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Musical Theatre Guild Remembers the Forgotten

By Myron Meisel

Musical Theatre Guild’s cast from its recent presentation of Triumph of Love (All photos by Alan Weston)

A hidden secret treasure of the local scene, Musical Theatre Guild for over 15 years has unearthed obscure, neglected or forgotten musicals, or ones that were never successful enough in New York to make it to Los Angeles. Perhaps most prominent among them was the first local presentation of Steven Sondheim’s Passion, although among the superlative offerings were terrific renderings of Stephen Schwartz’s Rags, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Allegro, Kurt Weill’s Street Scene and Sondheim’s maiden effort, Saturday Night, as well as a Parade that was far better vocalized than in the Mark Taper production years later.

Of course, there’s always a catch. In a most resourceful compliance with the Equity Staged Reading code, each of these usually quite challenging extravaganzas is rehearsed within 25 hours, primarily over a long weekend preceding the performance. Consequently, MTG concentrates on essentials: score and script. Onstage before the audience, everyone remains on book, scripts usually in hand. There are no production values, save for functional lighting and costumes. Big set-pieces are skipped. Dance numbers can be rudimentary, although I will never forget a duet of “Mountain Greenery” in Rodgers & Hart’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court that perfectly distilled perhaps the entire heart of musical comedy in 2-1/2 minutes of unalloyed bliss.

Necessarily the results can be uneven, but more often than not, these highly professional talents get to the core of these works, and one thing can always be counted on: They nail the songs. It’s also true that one of the hallmarks of musicals that fall out of the repertory is that they often are saddled with weaker books, though MTG provides a rare opportunity to hear these texts and to experience even well-known numbers in their original, often revealing, context.

Shannon Warne in Triumph of Love

For many years, MTG was eclipsed in attention by the tonier Reprise!, which operated on higher budgets and ticket prices and is now regrettably defunct. But I’ve always found MTG to be the more daring enterprise with far more acute taste and sense of adventure. Even on a bum night, which are few, everyone shares an unique experience of the fringes of an long-endangered species of an indispensible artform, crafted with love and secure technique, even at the price of polish and illusion.

After many years at the Pasadena Playhouse and the Alex in Glendale, MTG has moved to the Westside territory previously the province of Reprise! The Moss Theater at New Roads School makes a felicitious space. Unfortunately, this season, has so far been a rockier one than usual, with intriguing choices of titles, several of which have turned out not to have unfairly dismissed in their initial Broadway failures: Death Takes a Holiday and Sweet Smell of Success were rather forlorn candidates for musical adaptation, though as always with numerous offsetting points of interest. On the other hand, it was delightful to encounter Bernstein’s Wonderful Town with its theatrical context intact, and the revival of Cy Coleman’s City of Angels worked quite well despite the loss of critical design elements. I was a little surprised that MTG would revive such a recently long-running local hit as Ruthless!, but this decidedly minor piece was executed with appropriately over-the-top verve.

Triumph of Love (which MTG presented most recently at Santa Monica’s New Roads School) somewhat unaccountably made it to Broadway in 1997, where it closed after a mere 87 performances (conceivably, it could have obtained more traction in off-Broadway environs). A product of the past generation’s most welcome renaissance of Pierre de Marivaux (The Game of Love and Chance, False Confidences), this attempt to musicalize a dazzling 1732 play tends of vulgarize its elegances, while the mostly decent songs flatten the fizz of the original more than they carbonate it.

Eileen Barnett and Kevin Symons in Triumph of Love

The music by Jeffrey Stock tends to the accomplished generic, while the lyrics veer between the pedestrian to an intermittent sparkle of wit, though rarely at the level of the original dialogue they displace. Still, it’s a genuinely strong vehicle whose original virtues cannot entirely be obscured. It has terrific bones, this tale of a Queen of Sparta who pursues the love of a man who is the heir to the throne usurped by her father from his, as she disguises herself and her attendant as men and in those impersonations manage to seduce the affections of every other man and woman in the cast.

Given the rigors of under-rehearsal (and Los Angeles actors, whatever the rap on their limitations, through deep experience are the best cold readers in the world), the players’ comedy chops were well-honed, the action surprisingly fluid, and of course, everything was beautifully sung. What they could not accomplish was the larger task of obscuring the innate weaknesses of the project with the extended work required to create a camouflaging spectacle. What they did laudably achieve was to afford the audience the singular opportunity to encounter an unlikely bit of esoterica and address the intrinsic curiosity of lovers of the form.

The best is yet to come, one expects, because the balance of the season includes on February 8 the truly legendary and possibly never revived 1954 The Golden Apple with the immortal songs of Jerome Moross and John LaTouche (originally directed by Norman Lloyd, who turned 100 last week in his bid to become as nearly indestructible as Irving Berlin and George Abbott), on April 12 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and, most extraordinarily, on June 14, the West Coast premiere of Sondheim’s latest musical, Road Show (formerly known as Bounce), as misbegotten as any consequential endeavor in musical theater in recent memory, an absolute must. So mark all calendars appropriately.

For more information on Musical Theatre Guild, visit www.musicaltheatreguild.com