Composer Jerry Herman On Why 'Mack and Mabel' Is A Challenge
Robert Preston and Bernadette Peters from the original Broadway production
Very sad news: Broadway composer Jerry Herman is dead at 88. The composer of “Hello,. Dolly!”, “Mane” , “L:a Cage Aux Faux,” “Dear World,” “Mack and Mabel,” “Milk and Honey,” “The Grand Tour,” and other shows died of pulmonary complications in his Miami home where he had been living with his partner, real estate broker Terry Marler.
He had a special relationship with Goodspeed Musicals where”Dolly,” “Mame,” “Mack and Mabel” and “La Cage Aux Folles” were revived and “with a re-imaged “Dear World” was presented at its Norma TTerris Theatre in Chester.
I interviewed the composer several times over the years. Here are a few of those stories from 2004.
One of the longest-running musical theater questions -- Can "Mack & Mabel" be revived successfully? -- will at last be answered when the cult show with the gorgeous songs receives a major face lift under composer Jerry Herman's watchful eye at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam.
Kept alive for decades by a steady-selling original cast album (and when Olympians Torvill and Dean skated to the show's overture in the mid-1980s), "Mack & Mabel" became the show that didn't get a break when it closed after 65 performances in 1974.
Some blamed the darkness of Gower Champion's direction and Michael Stewart's book; others pointed to the 30-year age gap between its romantic leads Robert Preston and Bernadette Peters; still others thought the show was done in by a static set, backlash against Herman's brand of songwriting or when the show's producer David Merrick prematurely pulled the plug because the theater's owners were eager to bring in "The Wiz."
"It's always been my favorite work," says Herman, the composer of such hits as "Hello, Dolly!", "Mame" and "La Cage Aux Folles." "It's frustrating to have a show that you honestly believe has everything that a good Broadway musical is supposed to have not make it."
'Tricky Idea'
Well, almost everything.
Critics praised the show's songs -- which includes such now-cabaret standards as "Time Heals Everything," "I Won't Send Roses" -- but said the production and script were too downbeat.
Ethan Mordden writes in his book about musicals of the '70s, "One More Kiss," that "Mack & Mabel" with its depiction of a romance set in the days of silent film comedies, bathing beauties and the pie-throwing Keystone Kops (not to mention its melodic songs and tap-happy dancing) should have been a "Good Idea Musical" but it turned into "a Tricky Idea Musical." Mordden calls the show "a carefree musical comedy's absorption of the serious musical play's aesthetics" -- and it just didn't take.
The show was loosely based on the mismatched relationship between workaholic, bombastic and surly silent comedy director Mack Sennett and his plucky waitress-turned-screen comedian Mabel Normand. It becomes a romantic triangle with "the other woman" being Sennett's love of moviemaking. But the show takes a depressing turn when Normand, feeling unfulfilled in the relationship, goes down a ruinous path, becoming involved in drink, drugs and a scandalous murder.
And then she dies.