Last Friday evening, Carolyn and I attended a production of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the season's closing production for the Reprise! series. Reprise! (they spell it with the exclamation point) is the west coast equivalent of the New York-based series called Encores! — also spelled with an exclamation point. The premise with both is to revive, however briefly, old musicals for short runs with, they hope, all-star casts. Initially, the premise also included that these shows be staged with no sets, no costumes and no choreography…but many enterprises that mount such shows are now presenting minimal sets and a fair amount of costuming and choreography.
The amount of memorization expected of the cast has similarly evolved. Initially, when a show was offered in a "concert version," they stood at music stands and read from their scripts. Then some shows began building in more movement, and the actors took to carrying their scripts about, which generally meant learning the dialogue to the extent humanly possible and referring to the books when necessary. Nowadays, no scripts are in sight. As a result, these shows sometimes remind one of the proverbial dancing bear: You're impressed not with how well they do it but that they can do it at all. Given as little rehearsal time as the budgets permit — in some cases, they're still operating with "concert style" schedules and fees — for the actors to simply learn it all and do it all is a Herculean achievement.
Reprise! does each show for less than two weeks. My subscription tickets are always for late in each run, whereas my friend Len Wein has tickets for early in the run. We compare notes and generally come to the conclusion that I'm seeing better performances than he is. After their version of Strike Up The Band, I spoke with one of the actresses in it who said, "What you saw [at one of the final performances] was what we should have had on opening night."
The problem with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes the other evening was, I suspect, largely one of insufficient rehearsal and tryouts. The book to the show — which I'd never seen before — is by and large a dated snooze. Still, there might not have had so many awkward silences had the cast performed it 10 or 20 more times. Some shows and performers require more work than others and, this time, I got the feeling everyone was still trying to remember where to stand; forget about finding the best way to deliver any given line. Alice Ripley, who performed the lead, exuded charm and sexiness and there were others on the stage who sometimes rose above the prep time. But overall, it reminded me of one of those shows one occasionally sees where an understudy has gone on in a key role and you're just praying from them to get through it in one piece. In this case though, it wasn't one actor. It was everyone…and it probably wasn't their fault.