Wm. Charles Morrow wrote: ↑Sat Mar 07, 2020 8:11 am
When
Mack & Mabel played at City Center last month I wasn’t able to attend in person, but happily the show was recorded on video for the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive (TOFT). Earlier this week I watched the tape.
I’d never seen the show before, and it left me with mixed feelings. Like practically everyone says, the Jerry Herman score is tuneful and appealing; the man who wrote “Hello, Dolly” definitely knew how to craft a song with hooks. But the main problem with this show is the libretto, i.e. Michael Stewart’s script. I went in knowing this wasn’t going to be a documentary about the silent movie era, and that the details would be scrambled and fictionalized, but even so it left me kind of rattled. Aside from the historical errors, however, the book is superficial and full of clichés.
For example: Mabel, as presented here, starts out not as the professional model she was in reality, but as a delivery girl from a delicatessen. She shows up at the movie studio with an order of sandwiches, enters through the wrong door while a scene is being filmed, and spoils a take. Everyone seems to think this is hilarious, and she’s hired on the spot. Of course, that trope goes back to
Merton of the Movies (the novel, the play, and the film adaptations), and even Chaplin used a version of it in
The Circus, but it never rings true. What’s so funny about spoiling a take? And it also implies that Mabel, like Merton, wasn’t especially gifted, but just a klutz who got lucky.
As for anachronisms and historical errors, there are tons of them—although again, we shouldn’t expect accuracy from a show like this one, and there’s no point in getting too literal-minded about it. That said, here are a few examples: in a scene set in 1911, an actress aspires to own “a mansion like Pickford’s.” Way too early, of course. There’s a reference to D.W. Griffith making epics “with grandeur and sweep” at a time when he was still directing modest shorts for Biograph. We’re specifically told that Sennett conceives the idea for the Keystone Kops in 1923—a decade late, and six years after the Keystone brand folded. Mabel sails to Europe with William Desmond Taylor almost two years after his death. (More about Taylor in a moment.) Etc. etc.
There’s a comedian in the show called “Fatty Arbuckle,” but in name only. He’s never called Roscoe, and he’s only there to cavort before the cameras. In this show he works for Sennett non-stop from 1911 into the mid-‘20s, and finally leaves when Hal Roach offers him more money. (I know, I know.) No mention of the scandal, but that’s understandable, as it would’ve overshadowed the central narrative. But they could’ve just called the guy Rollo Entwhistle or something, because he isn’t Roscoe.
What really bothered me about the show was its bizarre slander of William Desmond Taylor. In
Mack & Mabel the director is depicted as a youthful, freewheeling party boy, a heedless jazz hound who dances the Charleston and eagerly tries to hustle Mabel into the sack. (None of which sounds like the Taylor of record, to put it mildly.) Worse still, he is shown giving Mabel heroin, and starting her on the road to ruin. I’m surprised Taylor didn’t rise from the grave and sue everyone involved. As with Arbuckle, they could’ve simply called this character ‘Jonathan Johnson Smith’ or something, and avoided defaming a real person, but they didn’t.
Gypsy is a great musical, but it follows the life of Gypsy Rose Lee only loosely. Aside from Gypsy herself, her sister June, and their infamous mother Rose, all the other characters are fictional. I think that approach would have worked better in
Mack and Mabel. As it is, the songs are worthwhile, but the script is sure to irritate film buffs, and isn’t especially compelling in its own right, that is, for the average viewer who knows little or nothing about film history.