By Harry Haun Still, “she’s got a lot of guts,” marvels her brother, Rob Marshall , no underachiever himself (he directed the Oscar-winning Chicago and the currently Oscar-contending Memoirs of a Geisha ). He flew in for the opening to be in his sister’s corner, and he didn’t demur to the press on that score. “Revivals are the hardest things in the world to pull off”—Broadway’s last Little Me got him to Hollywood—“but what’s so great is that Kathleen was able to do it with such freshness. She created for the cast . There’s a company feel to the show. I love coming to see something like this because it reminds you of what theatre is supposed to be. One’s supposed to be touched by the performances, and Kathleen lets the performances breathe. Harry, Kelli, everybody—they're just great.
“Also, I feel this Pajama Game has such a sleekness to it. I’ve seen revivals of it that are pretty tricky because the book feels very creaky, but this has such a nice, fresh approach.”
Jeffrey Richards , with whom, by special arrangement, Roundabout is producing the show, echoes the same sentiments. “There are two unsung heroes of this production I hope don’t go unsung,” he says. “I think Kathleen Marshall leaps to the forefront of directors and choreographers with this show—she has done an absolutely brilliant job—and I think Peter Ackerman did wonders at streamlining this book—a very good book to begin with [by Richard Bissell and the multi-hatted Mr. A]—and making the material even better and stronger.”
The Pajama Game is the first show that Richards ever worked on (he was publicist for the Hal Linden revival of ‘73), and he worked originally as a publicist on Glengarry Glen Ross , which he revived with Roundabout last year to Tony-winning effect. He’s pushing the envelope May 7 by opening (at the Lyceum) a show he has never publicized— The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial ; like The Pajama Game , a big hit of 1954. Herman Wouk ’s dramatization of a portion of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Caine Mutiny , will star David Schwimmer, Zeljko Ivanek, Tim Daly, Joe Sikora and Geoffrey Nauffts .
24 Feb 2006
Ackerman and Marshall gave the original book some serious second-thoughts, causing them to reassign lines and reshape characters. One noticeable change is that Gladys—the big boss’s zany secretary who is, by turns, loved and terrorized by the overly jealous time-study man, Hinesy—no longer dances the torrid “Steam Heat” number at the union rally, and Marshall can make a convincing case for this: “Gladys is always being falsely accused by Hinesy of being a flirt, so why should she go out there and strut her stuff in front of the whole union? Also, she works for management. She’s not union. Why would she be at a union meeting in the first place?” The answer to these questions is simply because Carol Haney could dance up a storm and, four days into the production, when she broke her leg, Shirley MacLaine could to (albeit, briefly, just long enough to be spotted by a Hollywood talent scout for Hal Wallis and whisked off to the movies).
So, does Megan Lawrence who plays this rethought, more grounded Gladys have regrets she missed the “Steam Heat” boat? “No,” she shoots back. “Have you seen me dance? God, no! Oh, my God, whattanightmare! When I found out I had an audition for Gladys, I said, ‘Oh, you must be mistaken.’ But I went in, and there were all these dancers, and I thought, ‘There’s no way I can do ‘Steam Heat.’ And they kept calling me back, and they kept rethinking the character.” In time, they rethought it down to less demanding dancing.
But the energetically daffy Lawrence does manage to work up some compensatory “steam heat” with Connick in and around and down under a piano that has hilariously been worked into “Hernando’s Hideaway.” “Not so bad for a day’s pay, huh?” she cracks.
Another carrot is the charming little soft-shoe number which Hinesy and Gladys get to execute called “The Three of Us (Me, Myself and I),” one of two trunk songs that have been dusted off and inserted into the revival. It was written in 1964, the year that Michael McKean did not land the role of Hinesy in his high school production of The Pajama Game , so there was a measure of poetic justice that the number got to fall to him.
“It was written for Jimmy Durante,” says McKean, “and Durante used to do it in his act, but he never recorded it, so it’s kind of an orphan. Kathleen heard it and said, ‘Wow! That would be a great song for Hinesy and Gladys at the end of the show.” It works melodically quite well with Hinesy’s earlier number, “I’ll Never Be Jealous Again” when the songs are integrated. “That’s David Chase , who’s our musical director, and his arrangers. It’s a phenomenal bunch of musicians. There are only 12 people in the pit, and they play like 30.”
"The Three of Us" was also sung—by the original Hinesy, Eddie Foy Jr.—in a Donald O'Connor television special called "Olympus 7000." Another song cut from The Pajama Game that Marshall briefly considered putting into the revival was "The Man Who Invented Love." Words and music for these two song and for the other new addition—“The World Around Us,” which Connick gives his Sinatraesque best—are the work of the show’s composer, Richard Adler , 84 and beaming to beat the band about the show on opening night.
His original lyricist, Jerry Ross, died at age 29 on Nov. 11, 1955, of complications related to the lung disease bronchiectisis, a few months after the opening of the second Adler & Ross smash, Damn Yankees . He would have been 80 on March 9. One can only ponder what might have been, but the legacy of these shows lingers on so sweetly and solidly.
