Where Great Musicals Are Reborn

By Gerald Clarke

The Goodspeed Opera gives its regards to Broadway

There is a song in the Goodspeed Opera House's smashing revival of George M. Cohan's Little Johnny Jones that invariably stops the show: Give My Regards to Broadway. Nearly everybody in the audience has heard the words and smiles in recognition. But to the people who run the Goodspeed, those lyrics might just as well be Scripture: for the past 17 years they have been giving their regards to Broadway by reviving the great musicals of yesterday and the day before --and by adding a few new shows to the list.

The Opera House, a lovely Victorian fantasy that would look more at home on the Mississippi than the Connecticut River, has roamed the theatrical past like a Wurlitzer time machine.

The oldest play it has brought back was John Philip Sousa's El Capitan (1896); the newest was The Happy Time (1968), which preceded Little Johnny Jones (1904) this season. "We are trying to build a national theater," says Executive Director Michael Price. "And we have chosen as our mission the American musical. We are not going to let those wonderful works just sit on the shelf."

The new shows that have come out of the Goodspeed are almost as impressive as the old ones that have gone into it. The Man of La Mancha first had his impossible dream there in 1965, and Shenandoah followed nine years later. Annie also got her start there in 1976, and four years later is still S.R.O. on Broadway. Wherever the orphan goes, she is still remembered fondly in her home town of East Haddam, Conn. The 1% of Annie's box-office gross that the Opera House retained covers a substantial part of its $325,000 yearly deficit. After Johnny

Jones closes Sept. 13, the Goodspeed will open another original musical, Zapata, based on the life of the Mexican revolutionary. Any resemblance to the lucrative career of Evita has probably not gone unnoticed. "We are producing shows for the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, and not for New York," Price says in a well-learned ritual. "But," he adds candidly, "we always hope."

Still, the company's real love is the past and those tuneful shows that they just don't seem to write any more. "Most of the new musicals are not melodic or inventive enough," complains Research Consultant Alfred Simon, who helps the Goodspeed pick its golden oldies. Simon, 72, who played piano for George Gershwin during rehearsals for Of Thee I Sing (1931), has seen almost every Broadway musical since the 1920s and every year prepares a list of half a dozen possible candidates. "I look for good tunes and reasonably good books," he says. "I also look for shows that haven't been brought back before. Little Johnny Jones, for instance, has never been revived professionally until now." Eventually the ebullient Price, 42, a self-described "benevolent dictator," makes the final decision.

Price knows that audiences have changed since 1904--or 1968 for that matter. The Goodspeed's plays are not exact reproductions, but approximations of the originals. For the first quarter of the century, the books of musicals, the stories that bind them together, were rudimentary. Modern audiences expect more of a plot, and the books have to be extensively rewritten, with dated jokes carefully excised. The editing has to be judicious, however, so that the show's spirit is retained. In Johnny Jones, for example, Adapter Alfred Uhry wisely kept Cohan's quaint jingoism. "You think I'd marry an heiress and live off her money?" asks Johnny (Thomas Hulce), a jockey who is in love with one. "What do you take me for? An Englishman?" And: "French pastry ain't worth 30-c- compared to American apple pie."

Perhaps the major difference between then and now is choreography. Then there was none; today theatergoers would be dismayed by the static foot thumping of the first productions. "Dancers could not do then what we do now," says Dan Siretta, the company's choreographer. "We're doing something old, but we're also doing something new." For the second of Johnny Jones'show stoppers, Yankee Doodle Boy, Siretta used clog dancing, a style that was common in 1904 and looks a bit like flamenco dancing, with feet and legs moving up and down in one spot. He has widened the motions, adroitly using as much as he can of the Goodspeed's small stage.

Since Price arrived in 1968 to rescue the floundering Goodspeed, it has changed from a straw-hat company with a nine-week season to a national theater that stays lit 39 weeks. This year's season started April 6, and it will end Dec. 21 with a repeat of last year's hit, The Five O'clock Girl (1927), a lightheaded romance about a rich polo player and a poor clerk in a dry cleaners.

In the twelve years he has been director, Price has educated his audience to his own wants. He expects punctuality, and latecomers are made aware of their transgressions by being kept from their seats until there is a proper pause onstage. He then demands that, barring illness or death, everyone stay for the last curtain call; there is no rude rushing for the exits as the actors are taking their bows, a bad but common practice in most other theaters. When he was younger, Price once pushed an early riser back into his seat; he almost got a black eye in return. Now he merely points to such people, imperiously commanding them to sit down from a distance. Those occasions are now rare, however, and Price often drives in from his home across the river to say goodbye to audiences at the bottom of the grand staircase, like a preacher at the door of his church. "It's as if I'm saying 'Welcome to my congregation,' " he explains. "And it is my congregation."

William H. Goodspeed, an entrepreneur and steamboat operator who built the theater in 1876 to outdo a rival farther upstream, would have admired Price's flamboyance and his ambition. "When you come to the Goodspeed, you are not just buying a ticket to a play," Price says. "You are coming to experience the American musical theater. What ends up onstage is light--we hope--but it has meant many hours of looking at hundreds of pieces of sheet music and listening to almost every show that has ever been recorded. It is a very serious business we are involved in." --By Gerald Clarke

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