Colors of the Finian's Rainbow

By Mervyn Rothstein
10 Nov 2009

Kate Baldwin and Cheyenne Jackson
Kate Baldwin and Cheyenne Jackson
Photo by Joan Marcus

More than 60 years after his debut, Finian is still searching for his riches at the end of the rainbow.

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It wasn't until the first preview at City Center that I knew this musical was really good," Cheyenne Jackson says. "At the end of Act One, my character says that a little yellow piece of paper is better than money — it's credit. The audience erupted in laughter. I realized this 1947 musical was more relevant than we thought."

That moment, says director-choreographer Warren Carlyle, "was one of the things that appealed to me immediately — opportunities for magic."

The musical is Finian's Rainbow, a hit on Broadway 62 years ago. Revived last spring in the City Center Encores! series, it wowed audiences. Now it is on Broadway, at the St. James Theatre. In addition to Jackson, the cast includes Jim Norton, Kate Baldwin, Terri White, Christopher Fitzgerald and Chuck Cooper.

The glorious score by Burton Lane and E.Y. Harburg — which includes the songs "Old Devil Moon" and "Look to the Rainbow" — is one reason for the musical's current success. But the tale it tells (by Harburg and Fred Saidy), funny and fantasy-filled, shares responsibility. It was politically daring for its time, and remains relevant to the current state of our union — more so now than even a couple of years ago.

Jim Norton
photo by Joan Marcus
An Irish immigrant, Finian McLonergan (Norton), arrives in the mythical state of Missitucky with his daughter, Sharon (Baldwin), and a crock of gold that can grant three wishes and has been borrowed from a leprechaun named Og (Fitzgerald). Finian encounters a bigoted white senator who soon, courtesy of a wish, turns black.

"Harburg said he wanted to laugh racial prejudice out of existence," says Norton, a Tony winner for The Seafarer. "He does it in a magical way. He doesn't harangue his audience with his social beliefs. It's carried along by the music, the romance. It's a deep-rooted argument for being aware of and caring for each other."

That message holds great significance for a country with its first African-American president — and for Terri White (Barnum, Welcome to the Club, Ain't Misbehavin'), who plays Dottie, an African-American resident of Rainbow Valley. "It was the very first show I saw," says White, who has been in six productions of Finian's Rainbow. "I've seen it go from having a white senator who goes into blackface, to using a black mask, to using a separate black actor — which we are doing."

For her, it's about when the senator tells the leprechaun that he used to be white, and the leprechaun says he used to be green: "Don't you find an occasional change of color interesting?"

"It's about not seeing people for their color," she says, "but for who they are inside."