There was a charming air of mystery about the opening of “Broadway” last week at the Royale Theater: no one seemed to know just where it had come from. An ad had appeared in the Times one morning, and when you rang the producer’s office to ask why there hadn’t been any advance notice about the show they explained that no one had been sure there would be money enough to put it on. “How sweet! How wonderfully M-G-M!” you thought. And you didn’t remember until later that there’d been a reference in Variety to something called “Classic Broadway,” produced in George Abbott’s honor at the Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland.
The revival of George Abbott and Philip Dunning’s “Broadway,” which closed after four performances, had Lonny Price in the leading role; in every other respect it was the Great Lakes production picked up and moved to New York, and it taught the lesson that regional revivals can be every bit as bad as their home-grown counterparts. The mistake this production made was that of not trusting the audience: like so many New York revivals, it assumed a public too stupid to understand or appreciate the material. “Broadway” is a period piece; it ought to have been played as a period piece, not as a sort of pastiche of dramatic clichés. But everything in this production of the play (which Mr. Abbott was credited with directing himself) conspired to make “Broadway” look like a great big joke on itself: John Ezell’s set, Jeanne Button’s costumes, Donald Saddler’s choreography, and, particularly, the performance of its star.
It’s true that much in “Broadway” seems to us like cliché: its dancer-hero/gangster-villain conflict, for instance, focusing on the fate of a virtuous chorus girl. Can Roy, a simple hoofer at the Paradise Night Club, save nice-kid Billie Moore from the machinations of smooth-racketeer Steve Crandall, who can give her diamonds and show her a good time? It’s a question straight out of a “Singin’ in the Rain” production number. The subplot, meanwhile, could be a reel of “The Roaring Twenties.” Mean gangster Crandall has hijacked a truckload of hooch from not-so-mean gangster Scar Edwards. When Scar comes unarmed to confront the rival gang leader, Crandall shoots him in the back. Scar’s loyal woman, Pearl (the Gladys George figure), shoots Crandall, in turn; and, in the play’s penultimate moments, the cop investigating the case lets her off, presumably because he’s “strong for” her. But if plot elements of “Broadway” seem familiar now, that’s partly because it is representative of a kind of theatre that was later subsumed by movies like “The Roaring Twenties” (1939) and, still later, alluded to in genuine pastiches like “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952). Members of the “Broadway” company displayed the self-consciousness of actors performing familiar material for a knowing audience. What they didn’t seem to realize is that “Broadway” wasn’t a cliché when it was written.
The result of Abbott’s “doctoring” of Philip Dunning’s “Bright Lights,” “Broadway” was originally conceived as a vehicle for Lee Tracy, who, in the role of Roy Lane, the fast-talking hoofer, wowed New York audiences at the Broadhurst Theatre on the play’s opening night in 1926. (Tracy was an actor who specialized in tough, fast-talking roles. Two years later he would originate the role of Hildy Johnson in “The Front Page.”) Abbott, in his 1963 autobiography, describes how when Tracy made his entrance at the beginning of the third act on opening night “Spontaneous applause broke out” in the audience. “I had never heard anything quite like it,” writes Abbott.
Of course, Abbott was still a neophyte on the Broadway circuit, as were Jed Harris, who produced the play, and the young press agent Sam Behrman, who drew Harris’s attention to Dunning’s play when all the important producers had turned it down. The play that the Great Lakes Festival chose to include this year, in celebration of Abbott’s hundredth birthday, wasn’t just any old play co-written and directed by Abbott; it was the one that put him on the map—“the first overwhelming success of the season,” Charles Brackett called it in this magazine, then a year and a half old. But what made “Broadway” an overwhelming success (and all the critics of the day agreed on this) was its novelty, its realism, and the machine-gun pace that was to become Abbott’s hallmark as a director. Part of the realism lay in the language, which the press of the time described as “loud,” “salty,” and “brassy.” (It was one of the weaknesses of this production that the actors didn’t know how to speak in an idiom in which a girl is a “jane” and something easy is “duck soup.”) But part of it must have been lodged in the idea of making melodrama a backdrop for the little events in real people’s lives. The main focus of “Broadway,” after all, is on the hoofer and the girl’s not-very-good night-club act; the gangster melodrama is just a subplot.
Performed at breakneck speed, “Broadway” must have seemed like snippets of melodrama going by against a backdrop of earthy realism, and it must have affected its audience the way David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” or Lanford Wilson’s “Balm in Gilead” affected us. In the Great Lakes production, however, no aspect of the plot was subordinated to any other. Lonny Price led the cast in delivering each line as though it were to be his last on earth and the production dwelled so indulgently on each moment of the play that it seemed to last a lifetime. (Once or twice, I think I actually went into a trance.) There were competent performances from some members of the cast—most notably Richard Poe as Crandall, Dorothy Stanley as the avenging Pearl, and Janet Aldrich and Jennifer Thorsby as the chorus girls Ruby and Mazie—but the relentless hamming of Mr. Price tended to offset their efforts. As Billie, the heroine, Peggy Taphorn went through the play in toothsome distress. (Even smiling, she seemed to be suffering.) There were nice cameos by David Ossian, Bruce Adler, and Christopher Wells as a visiting trio of gangsters from Chicago, and by Steve Routman as a waiter. On the whole, though, the Great Lakes production took what was seamy in Abbott and Dunning’s creation and replaced it with cuteness.
In “Broadway” George Abbott assembled the most glamorous and exciting elements in American culture for an audience that was mired in normality and hungry for stimulation. The result may not have been literature, but it was good theater, and it was the first of a long series of gifts to the American stage. It’s a pity that the American stage can’t seem to reciprocate with any degree of style.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, July 6, 1987