Flashback: Mack And Mabel – Encores! – New York City Center

Alexandra Socha and Douglas Sills in Mack and Mabel at New York City Center

Mack and Mabel, an Encores! production, played at New York City Center.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

With the sudden death of the great Jerry Herman late December, the presentation of Mack and Mabel, one of his own favourite works, as the first musical at City Center this year was a fitting and well-deserved tribute.

It’s surprising that this was the first mounting of a Herman show in the Encores! series, apart from the couple of songs from Mack and Mabel that were used in the musical collage Hey, Look Me Over! two seasons ago. Aside from his greatest hits, Hello, Dolly! and La Cage aux Folles, Herman had quite a few remarkable but neglected musicals with gorgeous scores, such as Dear World and The Grand Tour. And of course Mame, despite its long run and multiple Tonys, is rarely revived.

Hey, Look Me Over!’s magnificent show-stoppers ‘Look What Happened to Mabel’, ‘I Won’t Send Roses’ and the overture, now used to introduce Act II, from Mack and Mabel, prompted a fully-fledged Encores! revival with the same leads – Douglas Sills and Alexandra Socha – both magnificent as silent filmmaker Mack Sennett and his star Mabel Normand. They were on par with the original Robert Preston and Bernadette Peters.

Based on an idea by Leonard Spigelglass, Mack and Mabel was originally called Hundreds of Girls, the title of a song that remains in the show, and was meant to be a light tribute to silent movies. When book writer Michael Stewart came on board, it became a bitter sweet and sad love story between the egotistical Mack and his ill-fated protégé Mabel, but the score remained the same.

The juxtaposition of one of the most tuneful and upbeat scores ever written with a downbeat, even tragic, book is the main reason why the original Mack and Mabel originally failed on Broadway, on top of the fact that in 1974, with the emergence of many pop-flavoured scores like Pippin and Godspell, Herman’s traditional show tunes were dismissed as old-fashioned.

Barely a decade later, thanks to the use of the overture by prominent British figure skating couple Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean during the European Championships, the original cast recording was propelled to the top of the UK charts, helping Mack and Mabel, with a revised book and starring the wonderful Caroline O’Connor as Mabel and Howard McGillin as Mack, to eventually find its way to the West End.

After a respectable run of over a year at the Piccadilly Theatre, Mack and Mabel has since been staged many times in the UK, notably at the Watermill in 2005, in the actor-musician format directed by John Doyle. Although Doyle’s production didn’t really work, it nonetheless transferred to the Criterion Theatre in 2006. A much better production was staged at the Southwark Playhouse, directed by Thom Southerland and starring Laura Pitt-Pulford. In 2015, there was a Chichester Festival production starring Michael Ball as Mack, directed by Jonathan Church and choreographed by Stephen Mear.

As much as the magnificent score is now recognised as one of Broadway’s greatest and arguably Herman’s best, the problems with the lacklustre book weren’t resolved by any of these productions.

The revisions by Francine Pascal in this Encores! production seemed to have found a way around this. Act II in particular became more involving and the contrast between grim reality and the legendary optimism of Herman was actually, and ironically, emphasised by the clever direction and choreography by Josh Rhodes. This was particularly true of the penultimate tap-dancing number ‘Tap Your Troubles Away’, which sharply juxtaposed the downfall of Mabel with the escapism of Hollywood glitz.

In better times, such a first-class, almost fully staged production would lead to a Broadway revival, which is what Encores! did for Chicago in 1995: re-establish a Broadway classic where it belonged. The dark romance between two self-centred characters who deeply love each other but are unable to express it, as conveyed through the poignant ballad ‘I Won’t Send Roses’ actually made more sense during troubled times. Significantly, they both sang this song, each with different lyrics, expressing their individual points of view, but they never actually sang together, nor did they anywhere else in the score.

Of course, Rhodes couldn’t have done it without such a splendid cast. Sills, who already played Mack in a Los Angeles revival, and Alexandra Socha, preternaturally born to play Mabel, embraced all the complexities of their characters.

One of the past weaknesses of the show was that it had always been too focused on the leads, with the supporting characters insufficiently defined.  But this had at last has also been solved in this revival, with the great Michael Berresse and Lilli Cooper giving the characters of William Desmond Taylor and Lottie Ames real flesh and blood.

The wonderful Encores! orchestra conducted by Rob Berman did full justice to Herman’s score. The scenic designs by Allen Moyer, costumes by Amy Clark and lighting by Ken Billington are also worthy of a Broadway revival.

Incidentally, the great Jerry Herman was also celebrated the same weekend as part of the Lyrics and Lyricists series at the 92Y in a show-stopping You I Like tribute concert, featuring Cady Huffman, one of the originals cagelles and the first Broadway Ulla in The Producers, also serving as director for the occasion.

Let’s hope this too will help put Herman up where he belongs, as one of the greatest composers of Broadway’s second generation, right alongside Stephen Sondheim, John Kander and Cy Coleman.

Patrick Honoré