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| 1 Winthrop Street - PO Box 345 |
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| Hallowell, Maine 04347 |
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| The Portland Phoenix reviewed How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in their July 8-14, 2005 issue. You can read the review nicely formatted on the Phoenix' website, or in basic text right here. | ||||||
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| To the top Singing the corporate tune at the Gaslight BY MEGAN GRUMBLING -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying Book by Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock and Willie Gilbert. Music and Lyrics by Frank Loesser. Directed by Bill Haley. Musical Direction by Marcia Gallagher. Produced by the Gaslight Theater at Hallowell City Hall, through July 9. Call (207) 626-3698. Bootstraps and ruthless ingenuity will never really fall out of American favor as the preferred means of salvation. Even when mass culture pokes fun at super-sized ambition, it can't help but laud it at the same time. A mixed American worship of and anxiety about careerism is behind the popularity of such modern spectacles as The Apprentice, and it also explains the endurance of the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. It won a Pulitzer in 1962, was recently revived on Broadway with Matthew Broderick, and plays this month on the stage of the Gaslight Theater. The quintessential self-starter in question here is J. Pierrepont Finch (sanguine Matt Bessette). He's a young window washer at World Wide Wicket, Inc. who is hell-bent, with charismatic single-mindedness, to make it to the top. Helping him upward is the play's eponymous book, his compass, which he refers to at the various stages of his rise. These consultations are produced impeccably by the Gaslight. Each time Ponty pulls out his green bible, up bubbles a bit of soothingly optimistic jazz vibraphone, and a voice straight out of the edu-info movies of the '50s (Bob Demers, flawless in tone and pace) offers him advice. "If you have education, intelligence, and ability, so much the better," the book says early on. "But remember, many have succeeded without any of these qualities." Ponty, of course, has all of them. He is a healthy young model of that particularly American combo of ambition, con artistry, and a blithe amorality about anything. That's amorality, not immorality. When our hero schemes, panders and behaves disingenuously to gain the favor of president J. B. Biggley (the fine Ron Veno, with great puffs of bluster) he never acts against any ideas of morals, but is rather serenely, charmingly oblivious to them. How American! He is also handsome and winning, and thus gains the help of many smitten employees of WWWI on his way up, including a slew of classic NY-working-girl secretaries. Not least of these is Rosemary (plucky Jennifer Smith), the devoted female who will be, as she sings, "happy to keep his dinner warm." In the romantic leads, Bessette and Smith are well-matched and make lovely, effortless harmonies when their characters finally get around to the romance part. Bessette is quite convincing in projecting Ponty's utter obliviousness to Rosemary's affections. He strides up and down the stage as if legally blind to anything |
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| unrelated to his own ambitions in the wicket company. And we don't dislike him for it. Nor do we like him, exactly — Ponty has the personality of a particularly charming and ambitious wicket — but we root for him, by good old American default. Thwarting Ponty is the bad guy and embodiment of nepotism Bud Frump, Biggley's spoiled nephew (the funny and physical Chas Lester), antithesis of the American self-starter. He is Ponty's most constant nemesis, but conflicts also arise from circumstances concerning Hedy, Biggley's big, blonde, benign yet fraught-with-peril floozy of a mistress (a great, brassy caricature by Teresa Curly Beaudoin). Can Ponty successfully negotiate all the hazards of corporate society, make it to the top, and still figure out that he's supposed to get the girl, too? How to Succeed reveals his story in a very episodic manner, with lots of quick scene changes that are hard on a production crew. In a professional production, there'd be a gaggle of stagehands and several varieties of technical marvels to facilitate these quick shifts. A community theater like the Gaslight has to rely on practice and timing, and it's evident that its crew has worked hard to keep transitions as fleet as possible. Still, the show does clock in at about three hours with intermission, something to keep in mind if you're keeping company with the young or the restless. Under the very competent direction of Marcia Gallagher, the songs that run through our hours in the World Wide Wicket company building are accompanied by a three-piece band (with the occasional delightful interference of a kazoo) and are sung with great vigor and barely an off note. Look for the tongue-in-cheek and well-blocked "A Secretary is Not a Toy" and the rollicking gospel number "Hallelujah." All in all, How to Succeed is a mild and decorous send-up of the corporate world, ultimately more affectionate than critical. In a post-Enron America, the story of Ponty's ascent would seem to be fodder for another whole dimension of irony, but Director Haley chooses not to aim it at a wearier, warier, more cynical American audience. Instead, the Gaslight plays it straight and early- '60s classically. That's a tad disappointing, but just a tad. The operative myths and values of How to Succeed, after all, do remain American classics. |
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