Rodgers and Hammerstein's State Fair
Fifty years after the Fox picture State Fair, the second Rodgers and Hammerstein musical has been given its proper setting-- on the stage. Now on tour, the production is expected to reach Broadway in the spring of 1996. Appropriately, it is offered by The Theatre Guild, who brought fame to Rodgers and Hart with The Garrick Gaities and to Rodgers and Hammerstein with Oklahoma. Much credit for the new version goes to Tom Briggs and the late Lou Mattioli, who adapted Oscar Hammerstein's screenplay and added eight songs to the film's original six. Most of the new songs are not unheard ones-- some are from Pipe Dream, Allegro, and Me and Juliet-- but they are given context in State Fair with such care that the result is a new and unified score. With orchestrations and vocal arrangements by Bruce Pohomac and Kay Cameron, direction and choreography by James Hammerstein and Randy Skinner, and a strong cast and company, the score and the production rank with the very best of Rodgers and Hammerstein. To have a new R & H show thirty-five years after Hammerstein's death ended the partnership is a treat; to have another great R & H show is a gift.
The 1945 film was memorable only because "It's A Grand
Night for Singing" and "It Might As Well Be Spring" immediately
and deservedly became standards. To explain how a caterpillar of a
movie
became a butterfly on stage requires some speculation on the
contrasting
media. One difference is the ratio of music to dialogue. The six songs
took up perhaps twenty minutes of 100 minutes of film, while almost all
of the musical's 140 minutes are devoted to music. The film was
primarily
dramatic, and the music tended to interrupt the story. Hardly anyone
remembers
"All I Owe Ioway" and "Our State Fair" from the movie,
but they are now ensemble show stoppers in a class with "Oklahoma".
Like the film, the stage musical uses the plot and some of the jokes
from
Phil Stong's novel and the Will Rogers non-musical film, but here the
songs
reveal the characters and tell the story.
Some of the movie's weakness can be charged to film
conventions
of the period, but the stage version puts the same story elements in an
entirely new light. In the film, the father of the central farm family
is a comic supporting character, an old buffoon. On stage, he's the
core
of the show. Not for a second could he be taken for a real farmer in
the
movie, but as played by John Davidson, one immediately accepts him as
someone
who might raise the best boar in Iowa, who could run a farm, and who
can
hold a family together. Casting and closeups don't present two
college-age
farm youths in the film-- they never stop being Dick Haymes and Jeanne
Crain-- and a 34 year-old Dana Andrews would not be interested in
marrying
a rural girl just out of high school. In the musical, Andrea McArdle (Annie)
and Ben Wright (Jack in Into the Woods) disappear into
their
characters. The show girl, as played by Donna McKechnie, is young and
aspiring,
and the infatuation of the young man is far more credible. Now the
newspaper
reporter is not a successful journalist wanting his own column, but a
wire
service stringer hoping to get a permanent job in Chicago, just green
enough
to make sense of his attraction to the young lady. As the reporter,
Scott
Wise is given the featured dance role-- his next part should be Pal
Joey. Not since Gene Kelly...
The film medium has no stage front-- we view the action as it happens
and
the actors play to one another. With our suspension of disbelief, we
are
covert observers of reality. This gave Oscar Hammerstein the
screenwriter
a problem. How does one show the simple decency of half a dozen people
in a story with little plot, action, or conflict? On film, the
non-musical
eighty minutes of State Fair are painfully slow. On stage, of
course,
the actors perform to the live audience, and the spectators are not
distanced
from the action-- they are collaborators. In the realistic context of
film,
especially a dramatic one like State Fair, it is incongruous
for
the characters to stop talking and start singing. In a staged musical
play,
it is expected. The characters are singing to us, letting us
know
through song what they think and feel. This, of course, was a prime
consideration
for Oscar Hammerstein the librettist-- let the songs tell the story.
The
creators of the new State Fair have performed the miracle that
Hammerstein
did when he converted Green Grow the Lilacs into Oklahoma.
This State Fair certainly is a musical play,
old-fashioned
without being dated. Everybody sings and everybody dances. The songs
are
not buried in a script-- they are sung to the audience without apology.
The orchestrations and vocal arrangements bring out fully their
qualities
as songs, as musical numbers. With Richard Rodgers's music, Oscar
Hammerstein's
ideas were fully expressed, and State Fair is filled with some
of
their best words and music. It should set Broadway back fifty years, if
only for a couple of hours a night during a deservedly long run.
Art Hilgart
Note: This review was written in the fall of 1995 during the pre-Broadway tour. The prediction was nowhere near the mark, and the Broadway run was very short. Happily, the show has resumed a national tour, and the good original cast recording is available on a DRG compact disc.