THANK YOU, DON AMECHE! By Peter Filichia
Sometimes, scattering those postcards around town does pay off.
That’s how I discovered a play called Thank You, Don Ameche. Lawrence A. Heman’s new comedy runs this week at The Sargent Theatre on West 54th Street.
The title was enough to spur me to play the three cast albums on which Ameche can be heard: SILK STOCKINGS, GOLDILOCKS and HENRY, SWEET HENRY.
Actually, Ameche starred in four Broadway musicals, but no Broadway recording was made of 13 DAUGHTERS. That was all for the best, as the Original Hawaiian Cast album proves.
And yes, there was such a thing before the show braved Broadway. If you ever heard its song “Puka Puka Pants,” you might indeed… well, puke.
SILK STOCKINGS had good ol’ American democratic values besting the Soviet Union’s Communism. That certainly made it the right show at the right time. The musical opened on February 24, 1955 – a mere 84 days after the Senate had decided to censure Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy. One reason was that the senators had had enough of his mostly unsubstantiated accusations that so many Americans were dyed-in-the-wool Communists. SILK STOCKINGS was welcomed as another way of saying that American values will always win out.
At a time when musicals weren’t routinely based on movies, SILK STOCKINGS was an anomaly. It was based on Ninotchka, an excellent 1939 film. Its plot had Soviet agent Ninotchka intent on reclaiming jewels that she felt belonged to her people, not the Russian Grand Duchess who had fled to Paris with them. Count Leon d’Algout, the Duchess’ beau, would see that she retained them.
For the musical, Cole Porter and book writers George S. Kaufman and (his wife) Leueen McGrath scrapped the jewels. They fashioned a story where Ninotchka made sure that Soviet composer Peter Boroff wouldn’t compromise his lofty values while living in Paris and working on a musical movie based on War and Peace.
That was supposed to be a joke, but six decades later, Tolstoy’s masterpiece became a Broadway musical: NATASHA, PIERRE & THE GREAT COMET OF 1812.
What Ninotchka doesn’t anticipate is that Hollywood agent Steve Canfield – and Paris – will seduce her.
Ameche played Canfield and did a smooth job in letting Ninotchka know that “Paris Loves Lovers” and that he would like to know “All of You.” Cole Porter’s famous ribaldry emerged when Steve sang to Ninotchka that he wanted to “make a tour of you,” including “the east, west, north and the south of you.”
Ninotchka had to spend some time in the City of Light before she saw the light. Once she did, though, Steve predicted that life for them would proceed “As On Through the Seasons We Sail.”
We’ll never know if Ninotchka would have liked Dave Malloy’s 2016 take on War and Peace, but she certainly hated the way Boroff’s music had been jazzed up by crass Americans. She is outraged, abandons Paris, closes her newfound open-mindedness, and leaves with nothing but her favorite Parisian purchase: “Silk Stockings,” about which Canfield ruminates in song.
Once back in the Soviet Union, Ninotchka misses her free-world freedom and defects. What better outcome for a post-McCarthy era show?
Then, 44 months later in 1958, Ameche starred in GOLDILOCKS. Many have asked why the four collaborators chose this name for their musical, for it had nothing to do with that 19th-century fairy tale.
In those days, Broadway musicals were almost exclusively aimed at adults. So, much of the theatergoing public was well within its rights to assume that this was a children’s musical – and that they could ignore it.
To make matters worse, the logo showed a woman dancing with a bear. Why wouldn’t many assume that this was one of the three homeowners who’d been victimized by Goldilocks’ breaking and entering?
For this misbegotten title, we could conceivably pardon composer Leroy Anderson and co-lyricist Joan Ford for not knowing any better; both were Broadway neophytes. But Jean Kerr, the book writer and co-lyricist, had had five Broadway credits in the previous dozen years. More to the point, her husband (and partner on GOLDILOCKS) was no less than Walter Kerr, who certainly knew the territory from years of reviewing for the New York Herald Tribune.
Given that GOLDILOCKS was a musical about Max Grady, a silent filmmaker, and his reluctant star Maggie Harris, a more likely title would have been MAX & MAGGIE.
Does that title bring MACK & MABEL to mind? Frankly, the story of silent movie pioneers Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand may well have been the inspiration for this otherwise original musical. It, too, dealt with the early days of making movies on soundless stages.
Max, like Mack, would do a-n-y-t-h-i-n-g to make a film. Romance was a distant second or twelfth. That made Maggie just as frustrated as Mabel.
Ameche sang with confidence when expressing Max’s view on the female sex with “There Never Was a Woman.” But that was in Act One. As may have been predicted, Act Two had him singing “I Can’t Be in Love.”
Truth to tell, although Ameche was top-billed in both musicals, each concentrated on the female characters. Don’t the titles SILK STOCKINGS and GOLDILOCKS automatically suggest that?
Ninotchka was played by Hildegard Neff (as Ms. Knef occasionally spelled it) who made a dour pronouncement of love – “It’s a Chemical Reaction, That’s All” – great fun. Add Gretchen Wyler, playing Peggy Dayton, the star of that War and Peace musical, got a jump on what would be the Next Big Thing: “Stereophonic Sound.”
As for GOLDILOCKS’ leading lady, she was no less than Elaine Stritch. Her opening number has the brassiness we expect from her: “Give the Little Lady (a great big hand).” Audiences undoubtedly did.
Then came Maggie’s anger, snarling at the man she thought she would marry before Max came along. But George is a little on the boring side, so Maggie demands to know “(Where is) the Beast in You?”
Taking into account that Stritch’s time on Broadway often involved a reign or two of terror, you can easily imagine that she’d have no trouble releasing her terrible swift sword in this song.
But here comes the surprise: Stritch was sensitive, honest and moving in one of the best eleven o’clock ballads: “I Never Know
When (to say when).” She rues that, when it came to love, in “I’ve never learned my lesson,” but Stritch had certainly learned how to deliver a beautiful song that dealt with love and the loss of it.
As for Ameche, in 1967 he did one more Broadway musical: HENRY, SWEET HENRY, in which his character, Henry Orient, was the obsession of two teenage girls.
Really? Ameche was pushing 60 – an age that would look more like 80 to teenagers. Coincidentally enough, 80 was precisely the unimpressive number of performances that the musical could muster.
Few might have expected any kind of rebound for Ameche after HENRY, SWEET HENRY went sour. But in 1985, he came out of nowhere to film a substantial role in Cocoon and receive an Oscar.
If the musical GOLDILOCKS was no fairy tale, Don Ameche would see his long career take a turn worthy of a fairy-tale ending.
Peter Filichia can be heard most weeks of the year on www.broadwayradio.com. His calendar – A SHOW TUNE FOR TODAY: 366 Songs to Brighten Your Year – is now available on Amazon.
