The Goodspeed’s Herman-izing again—Mame!
And they have just announced where and when—Mame!
It’s directed by Ray Roderick—he did My One and Only too
But it’ll be a while ‘til we know who’s playing Mame, who who who who?
With a couple of weeks to go in their current season, Goodspeed Musicals is whetting appetites for 2012 with the announcement of two of the three shows happening at their main digs, the Goodspeed Opera House. The April-December, 2012 season will be the theater’s 49th.
Mame opens the season April 20-July 1, directed by Ray Roderick (who did two Goodspeed shows this season, My Own and Only and Hello! My Baby, the latter still up and running through Nov. 27 at the Norma Terris Theatre in Chester). The advance notice gives you a chance to reread the original Patrick Dennis novel Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade, on which the musical is based.
The show’s 80-year-old composer/lyricist Jerry Herman will reportedly consult on the production. Mame’s book is by the prolific playwriting partners Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, who revised their own straight-play adaptation of Dennis’ quasi-autobiographical into the musical.
The Goodspeed did an earlier Herman/Lawrence/Lee collaboration, Dear World (based on The Madwoman of Chaillot) at its Norma Terris Theatre eleven years ago. Herman’s Mack and Mabel (about silent movie icons Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand, with a book by Michael Stewart) played the Goodspeed Opera House in 2004, with Herman in attendance on opening night. The theater bestowed one of its Goodspeed Awards for Outstanding Contribution to Musical Theatre on Herman in 2007.
Following Mame’s run, June will be busting out all over—in mid-July, through Sept. 23—with a new production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel. Yes, those who despair that Jerry Lewis is no longer singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” at the close of the Labor Day telethon will get a chance to hear the song done in its original context.
If Carousel—with its grand dance sequences and, um, that carousel—seems a tad large for the intimate Goodspeed stage, rest assured that the Goodspeed’s entrusted it to director Rob Ruggiero. It was Ruggiero who so adroitly shoehorned the even grander Showboat onto the same Goodspeed Opera House stage this season. Wouldn’t it be funny if the staging required somebody in Carousel to walk alone?
Despite their larger-than-life Broadway pedigrees, Mame and Carousel both share affinities with the regional theater movement that the Goodspeed exemplifies. Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (whose biggest hit was the socially conscious legal drama Inherit the Wind) were pioneers of that movement via their non-commercially-motivated American Playwright’s Theatre. Carousel is based on Ference Molnar’s 1909 play Liliom, the two best-known American productions of which were both produced by another proudly non-commercial producing organization, the Theatre Guild. Carousel is now routinely scaled down for small theaters—especially, it seems, in Chicago. The Court Theatre’s 2008 production later played New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre, and the Chicago Lyric Opera company did its own reconstituted Carousel just last year.
The choreographers for both Mame and Carousel’s choreographers are new to the Goodspeed, and both bear Broadway “Associate Choreographer” credits: Mame’s Vince Pesce for Anything Goes, Pajama Game, Wonderful Town and Little Shop of Horrors and Carousel’s Parker Esse for Finian’s Rainbow and A Tale of Two Cities.
The Goodspeed Opera House’s third and final show of the 2012 season, which will play Oct. 5-Dec. 9, has yet to be announced, as does the entire sched of new musicals at the Norma Terris space. It’s not too early to subscribe, however: three shows for $81-$216, depending on when you go and where you sit. Single tickets for the shows don’t go on sale until late February.
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