Upping the Auntie: A 'Mame' Makeover

By Nelson Pressley
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, May 28, 2006

It's a Friday afternoon, and Mame Dennis -- better known as Auntie Mame, or (full chorus now) just "Mame" on the musical stage -- is moving into the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater. Two grand pianos, sofas the length of Buicks, an erotic white sculpture, eye-popping drops: The dame totes in a lot of showy stuff.

The Kennedy Center's new $5 million production, with Christine Baranski in the title role, aims to give the old girl a new shine. (Performances began yesterday; the official opening is Thursday, and there is informed chatter that it could transfer to New York.) "Mame" was composer-lyricist Jerry Herman's rapid follow-up to "Hello, Dolly!" and it opened almost exactly 40 years ago in a "splendidly splashy production," according to the New York Times.

"If that was splashy," says director Eric Schaeffer as he watches designer Walt Spangler's set pieces being hauled into place, "then this is really, really splashy." Schaeffer, dressed in a long-sleeved black T-shirt and camouflage shorts, walks through the hubbub like a kid commando happily surveying the troops.

High style has always been fundamental to this "razzle dazzle butterfly," as Patrick Dennis described the character in his 1955 novel, "Auntie Mame" (subtitled "An Irreverent Escapade"). That book begat a hit play with Rosalind Russell, which begat a hit movie (Russell again). Then came the long-running musical -- more than 1,500 performances at the Winter Garden -- that made a big Broadway star of Angela Lansbury.

The 1974 movie of the musical was an unwatchable Lucille Ball bomb. So aside from a short-lived revival with Lansbury in 1983, "Mame" -- about a Depression-era bohemian whose young orphaned nephew is thrust into her unconventional lifestyle -- hasn't been heard from much since.

Not that this "Mame" will try to outdo the technically overloaded spectaculars that, along with jukebox musicals, have defined Broadway in recent years. Schaeffer and Baranski, speaking a day apart, eventually invoke the same phrase: "It is what it is." (Sounds like "I Am What I Am," the signature song from another long-running Herman hit, "La Cage Aux Folles.") So what seems to be on tap at the Kennedy Center is a 2006 edition of old-fashioned showbiz panache.

"It's a little slicker, a little hipper," suggests Schaeffer, longtime artistic director of the musically distinguished Signature Theatre in Arlington. "And streamlined."

In perhaps the most dramatic example of trimming, he describes changes made to "Open a New Window," a characteristically life-embracing anthem sung by Mame (and, eventually, the full chorus) in Act 1. Originally, Schaeffer says, the production number ran about eight minutes.

"Cut, cut, cut," he says now. "And Jerry was great about it. We're trying not to let the audience get ahead of the show."

"I'll gladly cut a whole song if it's holding up the action," says Herman, 74, delighted and aglow in his penthouse room at the Watergate Hotel. "I'm one of those unafraid to go to the chopping block. It's lost a little bit of unneeded fat around the edges of the fillet. I think it's just tighter, and actually better."

And more implicitly modern, offers Baranski -- still rooted in the character's 1920s and Herman's 1960s, but with an awareness of where we are now.

"I feel this 'Mame' has to have real sensuality and sexuality," she says, "and push certain aspects of her personality a little more."

Schaeffer thinks Spangler's Manhattan skyline design and a youthful cast are the ingredients to put a blush in "Mame's" cheek. Baranski, though, thinks it'll be the dancing.

"I'm not sure other Mames have ever danced this much," says Baranski, 54, during a lunch break. "I'm very, very physical. And I love that Warren" -- choreographer Warren Carlyle -- "has given me so much sexy dancing."

Carlyle and Schaeffer had at least two big dance transitions in mind, and after a while, they thought, "If Christine's up for it, let's just put her in this stuff." Baranski was up for it, and to hear the director tell it, some of the choreography verges on the acrobatic.

"It's not just step-touch," he says. "She's out there dancin'."

But ask Herman what's most striking to him about his work 40 years later, and the king of the show tune says . . . the lyrics.

"I'm still thought of as the Title Song Kid," he says ruefully. (Louis Armstrong's international smash recording of "Dolly," he contends in jest, is "the worst thing that happened to me.") Audiences might recognize more of the "Mame" score than they suspect, with "My Best Girl," "Bosom Buddies" and "We Need a Little Christmas" likely to ring a bell. But Herman and company are trumpeting the words.

Says Baranski: " 'If He Walked Into My Life' is an extraordinary inner monologue. It's not just some nightclub ballad. I have really drawn on much of what my life has been with my own kids -- you know, asking how did it go wrong, what could I have done better, would I be the same person?"

In the original orchestrations, that song has a big swelling lead-in before calming to introspection.

"We took that whole introductory section out," Schaeffer says. "Now it just comes out of the scene, and it has a whole different dramatic flair. No one's going to know that unless they study it or look at the score, but it changes the tenor of the show. All of a sudden it has this gut, and this heart, that perhaps wasn't as noticeable. Those are the little things that make a huge difference."

'That Actress'

First things first: More than tweaking or updating or glitz, "Mame" requires a star.

"Think about it -- who else could the Kennedy Center have used?" says Herman, whose story of getting Lansbury cast in the original production is legendary. (He twisted arms to have her heard, and when she took the stage he sneaked into the pit to accompany her himself.) "You have to find that actress. You can't do it with just a singer."

Baranski's acting chops have long been established, with Tonys, Emmys and other trophies to her credit, not to mention steady film work and household acclaim for her role opposite Cybill Shepherd in the 1990s CBS sitcom "Cybill."

As Mrs. Lovett in "Sweeney Todd," Baranski was a particular hit at the Kennedy Center's Sondheim Celebration in 2002, for which Schaeffer served as artistic director. That put KenCen President Michael Kaiser and producer Max Woodward in the mood for a bit of matchmaking. What, they thought, can we have her in next?

"Mame," she said confidently, having played the part in, well, high school.

For all Baranski's success, she still may not seem like the obvious choice to headline a musical comedy. Her pattern is to dip in and out of musicals; "Sweeney" was the biggest singing role she'd ever had, and she hasn't done a major musical since. "In between was a lot of life," the actress says in the course of discussing parenthood and losing her own mother at the end of the "Sweeney" summer.

Yet Baranski almost didn't take "Cybill" because of her interest in musicals. She was attached to Michael John LaChiusa's "Petrified Prince" and hoping that director Hal Prince might take it to Broadway. The choice was tougher than you'd think.

She says, "I remember sitting on Sunset Strip -- it sounds like something I'm making up -- in a little cafe reading the New Yorker. And in this issue was a review of the television show I was doing, with a rather stunningly good review for me, personally, this character." ("Has the killer technique," James Wolcott wrote. "Does more with a squinch of her eyes than Cybill does barrelling full speed ahead.") "And in the same issue," Baranski continues, "was a terrible review of 'The Petrified Prince.' " ("Jejune" was the kindest word in John Lahr's body slam.) "And I was sitting there going, 'Whoa -- close call.' "

Not the usual "theater is my true love" boilerplate from actors; this is the anecdote of a performer happy to surf from stage to screen to tube. "You can do the math," she says, sounding very Mame-y. "I graduated from Juilliard in 1974. That's a long career -- why would one want to be stuck doing just any one thing?"

Still, Baranski thinks she might be doing more theater now that her kids are safely out of the nest, and even floats the possibility of doing a bit o' the Bard here with her Juilliard teacher, Shakespeare Theatre Company artistic director Michael Kahn. And she sounds particularly grateful to be getting her musical breaks at the Kennedy Center, with full stagings and a robust orchestra -- the latter being a particular point of pride with Kaiser.

"It's difficult to produce 'Sweeney' in New York because it's cost-prohibitive, in the same way 'Mame' is," Baranski notes. Director John Doyle's current Broadway production of "Sweeney," in which 10 actors double as the onstage orchestra, is mentioned for contrast by several people associated with this production -- although Doyle just gave his signature treatment to Herman's "Mack and Mabel" in London, and Herman loves it.

In conversation, Baranski displays an appealingly light touch; almost everything about her seems classy and breezy, right down to the coppery high heels she props up on an executive chair. (At one point she deadpans, "All I do, really, in this show, is change clothes.") It has been written that Baranski is never seen without lipstick and pearls, and in this appearance she's true to form.

"I would hope," she says, serving a notion about the abiding thrust of the show with a convivial laugh, "that doing this musical in Washington would make being liberal very cool and sophisticated and fabulous, in the way that it was. It used to be very cool to be a liberal. And she's a very cool liberal, Mame."

That Bona Fide Star

Picture it: The current cast of "Mame," interrupted during rehearsal by Angela Lansbury herself. It happened a few weeks ago when she was in town for the Kennedy Center Gala; Schaeffer had his actors salute her with that final adulating chorus of the title tune.

Baranski smiles as she says: "She kind of did a little dance and strutted around a bit and wiped a tear away. It was so beautiful."

"The two of them were both kicking their legs up," Schaeffer reports. "And of course Christine was like: 'Now, what did you do about the hair? How did you change?' She was talking technical."

Bona fide musical theater stars: "We don't make them anymore," sighs Herman, "because we don't have shows like 'Mame' anymore."

Having been on Broadway with last season's revival of "La Cage," Herman has a freshly sharpened opinion of the Great White Way. Critics, producers, audiences -- nobody really likes the new stuff, or has much taste for tradition. What's a composer to do?

"I think everybody's confused, for good reason," he says gravely. "I don't think they know what's going to work. . . . I understand where we are with the musical. And I have squandered a lot of my talent by not writing anything for years, because I didn't believe I had a welcoming world to write it in. I feel that I am six shows short of the career that I could have had."

The current crop of musical-theater writers leaves him perplexed. "They are probably more talented than we all were at the time we were starting," Herman asserts. "They really are. But they're afraid to write a melody, because someone will say it's old-fashioned."

So for many reasons -- among them Kaiser's statement that "my goal is to make this the destination" -- it's tricky speculating whether this "Mame" and Herman might make it to Broadway.

"Would I like to? Yes, I would," Herman says. The laugh is quiet, but not without ambition: an exile dreaming of triumphant return.

"But," he continues, "I would like to go on anywhere. I would like this to play other cities. Because I'll tell you, people have been asking me for years, 'When are we going to see "Mame" again?' It hasn't been done. I think it's going to please a lot of people for that reason."

"No clue," Schaeffer shrugs about the prospects. "We're just trying to do the best damn show we can. New York could use something like this. It's the real thing."