I’m a big fan of the musical The Rothschilds. It’s among the shows I saw on Broadway in the late teen/young adult, formative years that profoundly laid the groundwork for my DNA as a musical dramatist. It’s a lively, energetic, touching and epic condensation of the history of the first two generations of a family of German Jews who emerged from the restricted ghettos of Frankfurt to become one of the most powerful financial dynasties in the world.
Despite all the acclaim attending it, it ran only two years. One can only really speculate as to why, but at a guess (and not one original to me), it just wasn’t the follow up to Fiddler on the Roof —which also had a score by composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick—that audiences were prepared for. The universal verities of changing tradition within a community and a culture—in which our main character, Tevye, a poor milkman with five marriageable daughters, who tries to hang on to a familiar way of life, sings “If I Were a Rich Man” as a portrait of his state in life and modest desires—were turned on their ear by a male-centric story of Mayer, a patriarch and his five sons, who sings not merely one song, but several covering variations on how well-to-do he will be and how he’ll use that wealth to change the lot of Jews the world over.
Yet it is in many ways a brilliant show, in which the dialogue (book by Sherman Yellen, based on the history of the Rothschild family by Frederic Morton) scintillates almost as much as the classical-music influenced score.
It’s
also a show that has haunted its creators for decades. They never thought it
was quite right. One story has it that the songwriters were in a cab along with
Bock’s son, who was listening to them moan about how in Act Two, second
generation son Nathan’s romance with Hannah Cohen felt shoehorned in for the
sake of romance; ands Bock’s son piped in that they had it wrong: the romance
was already in place: the love story was between Mayer and his sons. “Out of
the mouths of babes,” they thought. Skip over a reduced-cast revival in 1990,
that offered the show as originally scripted, and the death of Jerry Bock, and
we land in the new millennium, in which Yellen and Harnick re-imagine their
show as a version re-written to be done
in miniature (and in one, intermissionless 90 minute go), with some songs
altered, some cut, some added (uncredited new music by Harnick), and rechristen
(rejewvenate?) it with a title that celebnrates the new focus: Rothschild
and Sons.
There’s no question that it pleases its audiences at the York Theatre; there’s much to love in the show; but almost all its pleasures reside in what was there before, and very few in the new material. And though it makes for a great theatrical anecdote, Bock’s kid was wrong. Here are the problems:
Rothschild
and Sons doesn’t quite feel like a show
with its own unique identity, apart from its opulent original version; the cuts
and shortcuts through material,
the reassigned songs, etc. all show the labor of reductive thinking, the
artifacts of trying solve the problem of size without sacrificing scope. The
new songs in particular not only tell us nothing we don’t know, but backtrack
bewilderingly. Meyer (an excellent Robert Cuccioli, who played
son Nathan in the ’90 revival) sings a solo about how he has to expand his
goals to free European Jews from oppression. Perhaps the authors meant this as
an intermediary transition, but he’s already completed that part of his
dramatic arc. In the song “One Room”, initiated by his wife Gutele (Glory
Crampton), he articulates his desire to be
a self-sufficient businessman; later, in the song “Sons” he extols the virtues
of progeny who extend a man’s impact and drive and expand a man’s kingdom, concluding: There are walls to destroy /
And I’ve scarcely begun. / But with sons to deploy / There’s a world to be won.
So what the hell, exactly, is that extra
song following “Sons” doing
for a living? There are several such
“improvements” throughout the show, and they indicate that the authors were so
fixated on their umbrella challenge (the love story between father and sons)
that, like Nathan when he’s too headstrong, they stopped listening to what the
original show was telling them. (It needs to be acknowledged here too that the
new song material is vastly, but vastly of lesser quality than the songs from the original show. The tunes are
too bland to make much impact, and the lyrics are so foursquarely “on the nose”
they’re not much more than a rhymed laundry list of painfully obvious and
already implicit [and as often already explicit] dramatic points.)
Then
there’s the omission of Hannah Cohen from the original show. It’s not that you
miss the character of Nathan’s ladylove
and eventual wife; the new show is coherent enough; what’s missing is, in a
dramaturgical sense, the work her presence did. By itself, the role of Gutele
is a thankless role, an artifact of the 60s and earlier, a reluctant but
submissive wife who fears the consequences of her husband’s ambition, but eventually
comes around; any effectiveness she has is wholly dependent upon the charm and
vocal prowess of the actress playing her. Fortunately, Glory Crampton has
enough of that to do as well as may be done. But no matter how you revise the
lines, she’s a plot functionary, not a developed human being.
This
changes, though, if Hannah is on board. Because she’s the next generation.
Fiercely independent, submissive to no one, an advocate of women’s rights.
True, under deep scrutiny, she’s no more a well-rounded human than
Gutele—she’s another archetype.
But as the foil who can stand up to Nathan, she’s the character who tells the
audience that women are progressing in this world too. Upon reading the
original script with 20-20 hindsight, Hannah wasn’t a less effective character
because she was “shoehorned in for the sake of romance”; she was less effective
because she was ultimately unnecessary to Nathan’s progress as a power broker
(in fact, Nathan wins her over by faking her out; making her think she’s vital
to it when she’s of no consequence to it. A ruse she quickly uncovers, but it
makes her fall for him; and on the turn of that krona, they’re engaged. It made
for a good quick joke, but kept her from being a real partner). If the authors
had fixed that, and it could have
been done with a few quick brushstrokes…look under cake, eating and having.
Finally:
The show isn’t quite as much fun anymore.
In the original, both philosophical and financial arguments were quick
and made their points powerfully because they were pithy. Here several of them
are attenuated with new dramatic beats that are intended to express more
emotion but falter because, how can I say this, they’re expressing emotion. Which is to say the extra beats are not letting those
emotions, which are perfectly obvious and need no explication, be implicit in
the action. (Once again, I’m not talking about any of the lynchpin numbers of
the original score; all of those managed the tightrope balance of conflating philosophical
idea with emotional expression. I’m talking about the misapprehension that the show’s
original subtext wasn’t sufficient unto the task.) Not only is the new stuff
unneeded—it works against the natural vocabulary and velocity of the show, which is defined
by narrative economy because it’s a generational saga. Another example: It’s one
thing to have the brothers talk
about a strategy to take an oppressing nation’s economy to the brink of ruin by
forcing down peace bond prices, a conversation which occurs late in the new
show; it’s quite another to watch them do it in a number with all the tension
of a high stakes auction—a split-stage showdown which took place in the
original. Here too, I think the revising, surviving authors fixated on the idea that a
song about financial maneuvering was less
important than songs about feelings.
But when what’s fueling such
a
number are the very high humanist stakes that Mayer set out to play for
at the
beginning of the show, that number—“Bonds”—is not a song about finances
at all. It’s a song
about playing your final hand and risking everything for a noble cause.
The excitement is in the subtext (and it isn't even that far below the
surface; it's not as if the setup makes us guess). Sigh.
But
what’s done is done. And the show isn’t damaged in the new moments so much as
softened.
The
directing and staging of the new production (on a handsome set designed by York
artistic director James Morgan, an
under-heralded artisan) has a few minor hiccups of tone (a running gag of
Gutele’s increasing dishevelment popping out boy after boy into the enlarging
family, for example), but for the most part is delivered with a respectable
straightforwardness and a healthy pace—and by an eminently capable,
likable cast. As I say, it pleases the audience very much. And reportedly, at
some performances, more than that.
But
I think it should be able to kill them.
All the time. And it’s not like the ingredients aren’t still there to play with
further.
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