Inventing Mary Martin – York Theatre Company, New York

Lynne Halliday, Jason Graae, Emily Skinner, and Cameron Adams in the York Theatre Company production of Inventing Mary Martin. Picture: Carol Rosegg

Inventing Mary Martin: The Revue of a Lifetime continues at The York Theatre Company, New York, until 25 May.

During the 1940s, 50s and into the 60s, Mary Martin was one of the brightest lights on Broadway marquees. While she had her share of flops, her career was powered by a series of memorable hits, including One Touch of Venus, South Pacific, Peter Pan, The Sound of Music and I Do! I Do! When she wasn’t on Broadway, she was busy putting her personal stamp on tours of Annie Get Your Gun and Hello, Dolly! Now, marking the centennial of her birth (in the small Texas town of Weatherford on 1 December 1913), York Theatre Company, an industrious Off-Broadway organisation dedicated to musicals, has put together an amiable revue celebrating her life, her career and the songs she sang.

The show, conceived and written by Stephen Cole, is called Inventing Mary Martin: The Revue of a Lifetime. The premise of the title is that Martin often reinvented herself as she took on new roles. Wisely, there’s no attempt on the part of one performer to replicate Martin’s vocal versatility and the distinctive warmth of her personality and audience-winning charm.

Rather the performing duties are split between a quartet of talents. Jason Graae, the one male, makes a personable if perhaps a bit overly joking emcee and narrator of facts and figures. He also gets to display his easy song-and-dance-man abilities. The three women in the cast – all notable talents – are Cameron Adams, Lynne Halliday and Emily Skinner. The renderings of the songs range from solos to quartets, with new arrangements by David Krane for the three-piece band, led by pianist Lawrence Goldberg. Choreography by Bob Richard provides some nicely animated movement, and the plentiful period costumes by Patricia McGourty as well as the various portraits of Martin projected onto James Morgan’s handsome set underscore the reinvention idea.

If there’s an occasional tendency to over-sell the material, oh, well, that just seems to be the thing these days on New York’s musical stages.

The songs, of course, are the show’s raison d’tre, and many of the best-known of Martin’s repertoire – from ‘Speak Low’ to ‘My Favourite Things’ – are sampled in an extended opening number. This leaves room for less familiar selections to be aired elsewhere in the show. For example, Skinner gets to cut up comically in Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s ‘Flaming Agnes’ from I Do! I Do! She also delivers a soulful rendition of Irving Berlin’s ‘I Got Lost in His Arms’ from Annie Get Your Gun. The soulfulness is also matched in Halliday’s ‘I’m a Stranger Here Myself’ by Kurt Weill and Ogden Nash from One Touch of Venus. (Halliday, by the way, is not related to Richard Halliday, Martin’s second husband who during their 33-year marriage did much to shape her career.)

In perhaps the most reformatted number, Adams does a sexy, syncopated jazz dance version of ‘I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair’ which sounded and looked like absolutely nothing Martin ever did in South Pacific, but was an audience-pleaser. There’s even a song represented that Martin, according to the show, refused to sing because of its suggestiveness: Noel Coward’s ‘Alice Is At It Again’. The song was thus cut from his Pacific 1860, in which Martin starred in London. So, Graae doing his impression of Coward gives it a waggish airing.

However, as we all know, Martin did not refuse to sing Cole Porter’s fairly suggestive ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’. It was the song she got to sing when she landed a small role in 1938’s Leave It To Me. The show gave Martin her Broadway debut and the song gave her instant celebrity, sending her off to Hollywood. There she made a series of movies before returning to the stage – where she said she felt more comfortable – and becoming nothing less than a Broadway legend.

That Cole Porter ditty is saved for the finale of Inventing Mary Martin, with all four performers bedecked in similes of the white ermine jacket that made up most of Martin’s costume when she introduced the number. Some of the lyrics are also fittingly changed to “Our hearts belong to Mary”. The four performers have made a convincing case for such dedication.

Ron Cohen

Readers may also be interested in:

Cabaret – Studio 54, New York – Review

Violet – American Airlines Theatre, New York – Review