Riverside Theatre’s big, beautiful “Mame” banks on the same things many of its shows bank on: splashy sets, a polished cast, and terrific music that long ago etched a groove in the minds of an audience old enough to have gone to the Broadway show.
That was half a century ago. Anywhere else but Vero, with its large senior demographic, banking on a hit from another time and sensibility is something of a gamble. This production has all the pieces in place, with some roles large enough to include some real emotions, yet it never quite connects in that regard. That leaves the comedy hanging, and the show well this side of relatable.
With a book by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, the musical is based on the Lawrence and Lee play “Auntie Mame.” That play along with a subsequent film starred Rosalind Russell in a career-defining role. Both were drawn from a novel by Patrick Dennis, a pseudonym for Edward Everett Tanner III. “Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade,” published in 1955, became a massive best-seller, and became one of three Tanner works simultaneously on the New York Times best-seller list.
Like his auntie heroine, Tanner himself led something of a socially radical existence. After marrying a woman and having two children, the bisexual Tanner became well-known in the gay scene in Greenwich Village. When Tanner’s books went out of print in the 1970s, he worked as a butler, including for Ray Kroc of McDonald’s fame.
“Auntie Mame” the play opened on Broadway in 1956. “Mame” the musical opened 10 years later starring Angela Lansbury. As Mame Dennis, an unmarried bohemian with plenty of dough, is enjoying the last hoots of the Roaring ’20s with her adults-only social circle, her 10-year-old nephew, newly orphaned, comes from a farm in Iowa to live with her, his only living relative (she had no idea.)
That little boy, alone with his suitcase, is a sobering harbinger of the times ahead, even as Mame all but offers him a cocktail then shuffles him off to an experimental school involving (gasp) group nudity. Mame and little Patrick are barely bonded when the stock market crashes, a buzz-kill if ever there was one. The boy is bundled off to boarding school at the insistence of his stuffy trustee. And Mame musters enough esprit to go out and get a job. After flopping in show business – literally; she slips off a hanging moon – she finds a job as a manicurist. Right off, she is crushing on her first client, distracted to the point of filing his fingertips raw. But the debonair Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside is equally smitten, and in one of several attempts at vintage racy humor, sweeps her off to Peckerwood, his Southern plantation.
Alas, on their ’round-the-world honeymoon, Beauregard falls down an “Alp” to his death. Mame, now a wealthy widow, comes home to find that Patrick has grown into a preppy bore. Worse, he is engaged to a racist rich girl. Mame takes care of that in a hurry, dispatching with the future in-laws by buying up a lot next door to them for a home for unwed mothers. Instead, she sets the newly liberated Patrick up with a nice New York decorator (female – it’s still the ’60s, after all). The final scene jumps ahead 10 years and has Mame taking Patrick’s son to India.
The cast is led by Michele Ragusa as Mame Dennis. Last season at Riverside, Ragusa starred in another Jerry Herman musical from the same era, “Hello, Dolly.” On Broadway, she has played in “Young Frankenstein,” “Urinetown,” “Ragtime” and “Titanic,” stepping in for the lead at the last minute for the one-night 20th anniversary “Titantic” concert in Lincoln Center.
Corinne Melancon played the important supporting role of Vera Charles, Mame’s slithery, boozy, deep-throated sidekick. Melancon spent 11 years playing in “Mamma Mia!” on Broadway. Mame’s love interest Beauregard was played by George Dvorsky, whose Broadway credits include the title role in “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” as well as “Gentleman Prefer Blondes” and “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.” Jim Brochu, who played Dwight Babcock, the uptight banker entrusted with Patrick’s upbringing, won a slew of awards including the New York Drama Desk Award for his role in “Zero Hour,” the story of Zero Mostel. Laura E. Taylor, who plays the goofy Agnes Gooch, was in “Mame” at the Kennedy Center. She also performed in the national tours of “Disney’s Beauty and the Beast” and “Oklahoma!”
And Jazmin Gorsline, who also played in Riverside’s “Dolly” as Irene Malloy, trained in opera at the Eastman School of Music. Midway through the already brief rehearsals for “Mame,” she stepped in for Gail Bennett in the role of Sally Cato, the Southern belle.
Like “Dolly,” “Mame” was directed here by James Brennan, a Riverside veteran, with music direction by the indefatigable Anne Shuttlesworth, who had the same post for “Dolly.”
Brennan, who also choreographed both shows, hit the mark in “Dolly” in multiple numbers that had me blinking in disbelief. In “Mame,” there was less razzle-dazzle and the same soupcon of tentativeness that came across in the acting. More than once, rather than feeling in thrall at the full cast in full swing, I was instead counting off the beats – one, two, three, four. That sensation should have been dispelled long before opening night.
Chief within that hesitation was Ragusa’s connection to her young charge. While that actor, Bergman Freedman making his regional debut, easily mastered the endearing innocence of an orphan dropped into a Beekman Street bacchanalia, Ragusa’s Mame seems barely moved by her new role as maternal surrogate. We don’t see her flip the priority switch that would shut down her role as party maven as she takes on child-rearing. That left me feeling not great about Patrick’s fate. Sentimental songs like Patrick’s “My Best Girl” and Mame’s “If He Walked Into My Life” – two of the best in the show – ended up ringing a little hollow for me.
Amidst all those Broadway veterans, it was Freedman who gave this show heart. The son of two University of Central Florida graduates, he goes to public school in the East Village and trains intensively at the Joffrey ballet school and Act One Studios. Novice though he is in this his first professional production, he gave the story depth with his diligence and vulnerability. In contrast, Ragusa’s Mame seemed to be waiting for the nanny tag team.
That in part is the script’s doing: The very next scene after little Patrick’s introduction, he has been anointed house mixologist, doing play-by-play of his by-the-book martini-making for a newly arrived guest.
That guest turns out to be the uptight trustee charged with overseeing his upbringing, which includes, by his father’s dictum, a “conservative” education.
“Mame” runs through March 26.
