In 18th-century Paris, the appellation boulevard theatre meant a formerly itinerant acting company who’d carved out year-round indoor space along the newly fashionable Boulevard du Temple. Operating outside the strictures of aristocratic cultural policies, they created viable business models and survived that boulevard’s eventual decline.
Milwaukee’s Boulevard Theatre rightly takes a share of credit for the blossoming of Bay View’s newly fashionable Kinnickinnic Avenue. But now the company has sold its longtime home there; its next productions will appear at disparate urban and suburban locations suited to each show. “Going itinerant,” says Boulevard’s resourceful Founding Director Mark Bucher, “is a logical plan of attack because the audience community is changing and we have to change with it.”
The first step of this adventure is giant one: a concert staging of Pal Joey, the groundbreaking musical by Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart and John O’Hara. The site is the finely equipped South Milwaukee Performing Arts Center, an easy drive from Downtown Milwaukee and well worth the visit.
David Flores, the director of this hard-edged backstage musical, is seating the audience backstage. The actors will face them with the empty seats of the expansive theatre as backdrop. All the actual backstage action will be visible. “We’re having fun with all the playing spaces available,” Flores says.
“Concert staging” means a script-in-hand but fully acted performance accompanied by piano and staged efficiently. The focus is entirely on script, music and performers. It’s an excellent and now-popular way to experience the best rarely produced works of the American musical theater. Pal Joey has a special place in that history as the last complete show by the seminal team of Rodgers and Hart (Rodgers soon teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein). It’s a knockout work that’s both of and well ahead of its time. Panned by uncomprehending New York critics at its 1940 opening (an experience from which Hart never recovered), it was deemed a work of genius by some of the same critics at its 1950 revival, seven years after Hart’s demise.
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“I insisted on doing every song, every stanza, every lyric,” Flores says. “Most people would never have a chance to hear the full score. There are two great songs—‘Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered’ and ‘I Could Write A Book’—some very good songs and some deliberately corny nightclub numbers.”
The role of the attractive, caddish nightclub entertainer Joey Evans was created for Gene Kelly. “The most difficult decision I’ve ever had to make as a director was to cut the dancing,” Flores says. “But either you do all of it—and there are pages and pages—or you hold to a pure concert staging. The killer is that we have very fine dancers in our cast.” Where dancing is essential to meaning, as in some nightclub numbers and the dream ballet that ends Act One, the cast will show its physical theater skills.
And the cast is outstanding, a testament to Bucher’s nerve and charm, as well as the appeal of the material. The highly gifted opera and musical theatre artist Diane Lane plays the wealthy, married Vera—she who is bewitched, etc. by Joey. A book could be written about Alexandra Bonesho who’ll play Joey’s younger girlfriend, Linda. Marty McNamee, another gifted actor-singer just ashore from entertaining on a cruise ship, plays Joey. The fine Liz Norton plays the hard-boiled reporter Melba, a role associated with Elaine Stritch and the show’s great production number “Zip,” a joke on burlesque. Donna Kummer is the distinguished music director.
Why is Pal Joey produced rarely? “Because it takes incredible actors who can sing well and dance superbly,” Flores suggests. “Because it’s too cutting edge,” Bucher insists. “The hero is an anti-hero; the lovers don’t get together at the end. It’s a very frank picture of sexuality, especially on the part of Vera, a married socialite who has affairs with younger men and isn’t punished for it or presented as a tramp. They don’t write roles like this today.” Flores argues: “Audiences today expect that if it’s a dark show, it will be horribly sad; if it’s light, it will be a soufflé. Why ‘either/or’ when you can have both? There can be great pathos in “the girl said no,” or “I have ambition but no talent;” great depth and subtlety in styles that, for whatever reasons, we have dismissed or discounted.”
Boulevard Theatre presents Pal Joey at 7:30 p.m., Sept. 26-27 and 2:30 pm, Sept. 28. Seating is limited to 100 per performance. A dress rehearsal at 7:30 p.m., Sept. 25 is open to the public at a discount. The South Milwaukee PAC is at 901 15th Ave., South Milwaukee. For tickets, visit southmilwaukeepac.org or call 414-766-5049 for map/directions. For Boulevard’s season, visit boulevardtheatre.com.