I wasn’t crazy about anything I found when I looked up “patriot” in the Chambers Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms the other day. I found “chauvinist,” “flag-waver,” “jingoist,” “loyalist” and “nationalist,” none of which seemed to me to capture what I think is being reflected in the displays of Old Glory you see all over the place just now. One or two of those words seemed to fit the flags and banners on the stage of the Neil Simon Theater, where last season’s revival of Meredith Willson’s The Music Man was struggling to survive in the somber stillness that descended on Broadway in mid-September. All of them fit the view of patriotism that lurked below the surface of The Spitfire Grill, a dishonest little musical that closed last weekend after playing for a few weeks at Playwrights Horizon’s new space at the Duke on 42nd Street.
But the stars-and-stripes on the Neil Simon stage—unlike the trio of red, white and blue candles that someone, probably one of the unions, had set up on the sidewalk outside the Neil Simon when I went to check out Robert Sean Leonard’s performance as “Prof.” Harold Hill—have quotation marks around them. They belong to a vision of small-town America that, like almost everything else in Willson’s River City, needs to be legitimized, transformed by the touch of the show’s swindler hero.
Leonard, who gave such an affecting performance as the young A.E. Housman in Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, only recently joined the cast of the revival as its third Harold Hill. He has reportedly had no traffic with musical theater since somewhere around puberty. No matter. He is the first Harold Hill I’ve ever seen who isn’t trying to imitate Robert Preston, and that alone would be worth the price of a ticket, if you subscribe to the theory that it’s no fun watching someone recreate someone else’s performance as a great phony. Being a great phony means being good at fooling people. An actor who imitates someone else’s legendary performance may be trying to fool himself or us (albeit in the nicest possible way), but he’s not going to seem like he’s fooling the people around him, which is what we want to see.
The role of Harold Hill is itself necessarily in quotation marks, substituting as it does the mannerisms of the song-and-dance man for those of the traveling salesman, but by 1962, when the film version was made, Preston must have been quoting his own performance. For those of us who grew up on it, the role must have acquired another layer of unreality and been that much more removed from life. Substituting charm and vulnerability for brashness and brio, Leonard (whose dancing is graceful, his singing simple and true) rejects the whole buck-and-wing approach entirely. He goes through the moves, but wearing a barely perceptible wry smile and air of self-consciousness, as though Hill himself, and not Meredith Willson, were putting them in quotation marks. The result is that Hill becomes a specific individual pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes, not merely a musical theater construct. It’s almost irrelevant that, with the exception of the ever-enchanting Rebecca Luker, everything around Leonard seems tacky by comparison.
I went to see The Music Man for a couple of reasons. I wanted to do something to “support Broadway,” and it was one of several shows that had posted closing notices after September 11. Also I wanted to see something quintessentially American, and the premise of Willson’s show—the notion of a protagonist-crook who is somehow more honest than the decent people he seeks to victimize—is nothing if not that. It derives from our national distrust of conformity and the suspicion that society is by nature hypocritical, prone to a confusion between virtue and respectability that requires straightening out. Typically, the great American texts (I’m thinking more of Capra and Sturges than Hawthorne and Melville here) see the trickster as someone to be embraced by society, incorporated into it, not—like the clever servants in the commedia dell’arte tradition—because society has to be reorganized and given new life, but because the respectable citizens aren’t really any different.
If The Music Man is about the fraud as hero, The Spitfire Grill was more interested in the hero as fraud. Written by James Valcq and Fred Alley, and directed by David Saint, artistic director of the George Street Playhouse, it was based on a much despised film of the same title. That the musical was developed at George Street is an indication of the degree to which nonprofit theater has become a sterile vehicle for work of the most calculated commercialism. (The film was itself widely seen as a harbinger of the incipient commercialization then creeping into independent film.) Told mostly through the medium of bad dialogue and desperately inauthentic folk-and-traditional pastiche, it was the not particularly heart-warming story of a young woman, Percy Talbott (Garrett Long), who comes to a town in Wisconsin fresh out of prison, complete with Holly Hunteresque white-trash drawl, brave lopsided grin, and a jaunty toughness and resilience that just might see her through–and if you have to ask whom she killed or under what circumstances, all I can say is that you’d better keep out of my way!
I didn’t see the film, but the musical had the heroine greeted at the bus station by a stiff and clearly repressed but marriageable young sheriff (Steven Pasquale) who parks her with the town’s redoubtable matriarch (Phyllis Somerville), proprietor of the eponymous eatery, whereupon she learns to cook and begins warming the hearts of all around her. These include the matriarch’s nephew, embittered by a life spent trying to live up to the memory of her MIA war-hero son, the nephew’s downtrodden wife (Liz Callaway), and the town gossip (Mary Gordon Murray). The war-hero son turns out not to be a war-hero at all but a deserter and to be living down the road in a treehouse, manifesting the kind of post-traumatic stress disorder that keeps an actor from having to learn any lines.
When The Spitfire Grill opened, more than one reviewer compared it adversely with The Music Man, pointing out that both shows offered nostalgic portraits of small-town America and involved a stranger who comes to a provincial backwater and rejuvenates its inhabitants. There was another parallel, too. The Spitfire Grill seemed, like The Music Man, to celebrate American music. But where Willson’s show glorifies American popular song by finding it literally everywhere—in the shoptalk of traveling salesmen, in the squabbling of a local school board, in the sidewalk chatter of matrons—The Spitfire Grill had contempt for the traditional mountain music it tried to evoke, seeing it as repetitious and therefore easy to imitate. It grasped the concept of repetition without appearing to understand how lyric and melodic motif in folk music work.
The Music Man is about the marriage between cynicism and idealism that lies at the core of the American national character. In the case of The Spitfire Grill, the cynicism was all offstage, lodged in the thinly veiled disdain its creators really have for small-town America and its ignorant, benighted inhabitants. This was a show that thought the families of people who served in Vietnam were really sort of into the whole idea. (“Eight years old and a flag in my hand,” warbled Liz Callaway in a disillusioned, Malvina Reynolds–type ballad about the ebullient townsfolk going out to the parade ground to see the young men off to war.)
It’s not hard to see why Playwrights Horizon chose to produce this relentlessly stupid and obvious piece of work. It was a big audience favorite the year it was presented at Sundance. Sitting through it, one could marvel at the cliché-ridden lyrics (“Something’s cookin’ at the Spitfire Grill” and “Out of the frying-pan and into the fire!” and “…couldn’t see the forest for the trees”) and the indistinguishable musical numbers and at the same time recognize the focus-group mentality behind it. Here was a small-scale musical that had everything a regional theater could want, and every regional theater in the country would go on to produce it, no matter what the New York critics thought. It had a unit set, a cast of six (seven if you counted the grown man who spent the evening rushing about the stage wearing Army fatigues and a haunted expression) and a plot guaranteed to appeal to and flatter a suburban audience, people who had fled the city and wanted to see themselves as country dwellers but were too sophisticated to align themselves with real America.
Now, of course, the ground has shifted. Whether The Spitfire Grill will seem like such a hot property in the provinces is difficult to say. It may, in which case George Street and Playwrights will presumably get a nice piece of change, which they can pour back into their institutional coffers, using it to pay for more renovations, or (like the Roundabout Theatre and the Manhattan Theatre Club), to acquire some real estate and build more theaters for the purpose of producing more increasingly commercial work. Is this really what non-profit theater was supposed to be about?
There’s a theory that all art ends up being about itself—at its most decadent, when it no longer has anything left to say. I mention this because lately most of what’s going on in New York’s non-profit theater seems to be about real estate, and The Spitfire Grill really was a show about real estate. It was about redemption through the acquisition of property. The plot revolved around a cafe-diner that no one wanted, but that became desirable through advertising. (It also contained a love scene in which the heroine’s sexual interest in the eligible sheriff was sparked by her discovery that he owned a great deal of land.)
But art also starts out being about itself, a lot of it. The Music Man is about itself, and not just to the extent that it’s about music. Each one of those songs and numbers that discover music where none exists serves to refute the proposition that Harold Hill is a swindler. If, as he tells the disillusioned little boy, he always thinks there’s a band, that’s because there always is one. This seems to me a very different self-referential quality from the one that informs the current trend in New York’s institutional theaters, whereby companies, as they become fatter and sleeker, become less interested in the art form they were created to nurture and more interested in sustaining themselves.
– Mimi Kramer, October 2001