A Good Music Man, a Dishonest Spitfire Grill
by Meredith Willson
The Spitfire Grill
by James Valcq and Fred Alley (closed)
I wasn't crazy about anything I found when I looked up "patriot" in Chambers Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms the other day. I found "chauvinist," "flag-waver," "jingoist," "loyalist" and "nationalist," none of which seemed to me to capture what I think is being reflected in the displays of Old Glory you see all over the place just now. One or two of those words seemed to fit the flags and banners on the stage of the Neil Simon Theater, where last season's revival of Meredith Willson's The Music Man was struggling to survive in the somber stillness that descended on Broadway in mid-September, and all of them fit the view of patriotism that lurked below the surface of The Spitfire Grill, a dishonest little musical that closed last weekend after playing for a few weeks at Playwrights Horizon's new space at the Duke on 42nd St. But the stars-and-stripes on the Neil Simon stage?unlike the trio of red, white and blue candles that someone, probably one of the unions, had set up on the sidewalk outside the Neil Simon when I went to check out Robert Sean Leonard's performance as "Prof." Harold Hill?have quotation marks around them. They belong to a vision of smalltown America that, like almost everything else in Willson's River City, needs to be legitimized, transformed by the touch of the show's swindler hero.
Leonard, who recently joined the cast as the revival's third Harold Hill, was last seen as the young A.E. Housman in the Lincoln Center production of Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love. He has reportedly had no traffic with musical theater since somewhere around puberty. No matter. He is the first Harold Hill I've ever seen who isn't trying to imitate Robert Preston, and that alone would be worth the price of a ticket, if you subscribe to the theory that it's no fun watching someone recreate someone else's performance as a great phony. Being a great phony means being a great actor, and that means fooling people. An actor who imitates someone else's legendary performance may be trying to fool himself or us (albeit in the nicest possible way), but he's not going to seem like he's fooling the people around him, which is what we want to see.
Preston's performance was always in quotation marks, substituting as it did the mannerisms of the song-and-dance man for those of the traveling salesman, but by 1962, when the film version was made, Preston must have been quoting his own performance. For those of us who grew up on it, the role must have acquired another layer of unreality, been that much more removed from life. Substituting charm and vulnerability for brashness and brio, Leonard (whose dancing is graceful, his singing simple and true) rejects the whole buck-and-wing approach entirely. He goes through the moves, but wearing a barely perceptible wry smile and air of self-consciousness, as though not only he but Hill himself were putting them in quotation marks. The result is that Hill becomes a specific individual pulling the wool over everyone's eyes, not merely a musical theater construct. It's almost irrelevant that the production around Leonard seems tacky by comparison.
?
I went to see The Music Man for a couple of reasons. I wanted to do something to "support Broadway," and it was one of several shows that had posted closing notices after Sept. 11. I also wanted to see something quintessentially American, and the premise of Willson's show?the notion of a protagonist-crook who is somehow more honest than the decent people he seeks to victimize?is nothing if not that. It derives from our national distrust of conformity, and the suspicion that society is by nature hypocritical and prone to a confusion between virtue and respectability that requires straightening out. Typically, the great American texts (I'm thinking more of Capra and Sturges than Hawthorne and Melville here) see the trickster as someone to be embraced by society, incorporated into it, not?like the clever servants in the commedia dell'arte tradition?because society has to be reorganized and given new life, but because the respectable citizens aren't really any different.
If The Music Man is about the fraud as hero, The Spitfire Grill was more interested in the hero as fraud. Written by James Valcq and Fred Alley and directed by David Saint, the artistic director of the George Street Playhouse, where the show was developed, it was based on David Lee Zlotoff's widely despised film of the same title, an indication of the degree to which nonprofit theater has become a sterile vehicle for work of the most calculated commercialism. Told mostly through the medium of bad dialogue and a desperately inauthentic American-folk-and-traditional pastiche score, it was the not particularly heart-warming story of a young woman, Percy Talbott (Garrett Long), who comes to a town in Wisconsin fresh out of prison, complete with Holly Hunteresque white-trash drawl, brave lopsided grin and a jaunty toughness and resilience that just might see her through?and if you have to ask whom she killed or under what circumstances, all I can say is that you'd better keep out of my way!
I didn't see the film, but the musical had the heroine greeted at the bus station by a stiff and clearly repressed but marriageable young sheriff (Steven Pasquale) who parks her with the town's redoubtable matriarch (Phyllis Somerville), proprietor of the eponymous eatery, whereupon she learns to cook and begins warming the hearts of all of those around her. These include the matriarch's nephew, embittered by a life spent trying to live up to the memory of her MIA war-hero son, the nephew's downtrodden wife (Liz Callaway) and the town gossip (Mary Gordon Murray). The war-hero son turns out not to be missing at all but living down the road in a neighboring treehouse, manifesting all the symptoms of a shell-shocked vet despite the fact that he's actually a deserter.
When The Spitfire Grill opened, more than one reviewer compared it adversely with The Music Man, pointing out that both shows offered nostalgic portraits of smalltown America and involved a stranger who comes to a provincial backwater and rejuvenates its inhabitants. There was another parallel, too. The Spitfire Grill pretended, like The Music Man, to celebrate American music. But where Willson's show celebrates American popular song by finding it literally everywhere?in the shoptalk of traveling salesmen, in the squabbling of a local school board, in the sidewalk chatter of matrons?The Spitfire Grill had contempt for the traditional mountain music it tried to evoke, seeing it merely as repetitious and therefore easy to imitate. It got as far as the idea of repetition without appearing to understand how melodic and lyric motif works in folk music.
The Music Man is about the marriage between cynicism and idealism that lies at the core of the American national character. In the case of The Spitfire Grill, the cynicism was all offstage, lodged in the disdain that its creators really have for smalltown America and its ignorant, benighted values. This was a show that thought that people who served in Vietnam and their families were really sort of into the whole idea. ("Eight years old and a flag in my hand," warbled Liz Callaway in a disillusioned, Malvina Reynolds-type ballad about the ebullient townsfolk going out to the parade ground to see the young men off to war.)
It's not hard to see why Playwrights Horizon chose to produce this relentlessly stupid and obvious piece of work, based as it is on a film that was widely perceived to be not only remarkably mawkish and contrived but also a harbinger of the incipient commercialization of independent film. (It was a big audience favorite at Sundance the year it was presented.) The musical represented the same process at a much later stage. It was possible to sit through it, marveling at the cliche-ridden lyrics ("Something's cookin' at the Spitfire Grill" and "Out of the frying-pan and into the fire!" and "...couldn't see the forest for the trees") and the indistinguishable musical numbers and at the same time recognize the focus-group mentality behind it. Here was a small-scale musical that had everything a regional theater could want, and every regional theater in the country would go on to produce it, no matter what the New York critics thought. It had a set, a cast of six (seven if you counted the grown man who spent the evening rushing about the stage wearing Army fatigues and a haunted expression and never said a word) and a plot guaranteed to appeal to and flatter a suburban audience, people who had fled the city, who wanted to see themselves as country dwellers but were too sophisticated to align themselves with real America.
Now, of course, the ground has shifted. Whether The Spitfire Grill will seem like such a hot property in the provinces is difficult to say. It may, in which case George Street and Playwrights will presumably get a nice piece of change, which they can pour back into their institutional coffers, using it to pay for more renovations, or (like the Roundabout Theatre and the Manhattan Theatre Club), to acquire some real estate and build more theaters for the purpose of producing increasingly more commercial work. Is this really what it was supposed to be about?
There's a theory that says that all art ends up being about itself?at its most decadent, when it no longer has anything left to say. I mention this because so much of the not-for-profit theater seems to be about real estate, and The Spitfire Grill really was a show about real estate. It was about redemption through the acquisition of property. The plot revolved around a cafe-diner that no one wanted, that became desirable through advertising. (It also contained a love scene in which the heroine's discovery that the eligible sheriff owned a great deal of land sparked a sexual interest in him.)
But art also starts out being about itself, a lot of it. Willson's show is about itself, and not just to the extent that it's about music. Each one of those songs and numbers that discover music where none exists serves to refute the proposition that Harold Hill is a swindler. If, as he tells the disillusioned little boy, he always thinks there's a band, that's because there always is one. This seems to me a very different kind of self-reference from the one that informs the current trend in institutional theater?in New York anyway?whereby companies, as they become fatter and sleeker, become less interested in the art form they were created to nurture?finding and developing fresh, new work and voices that the commercial market could not sustain?and more interested in sustaining themselves.