Lucy Komisar
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| "FINIANS RAINBOW" --Kate Baldwin, Jim Norton. Photo by Joan Marcus. |
The story takes place in the 1940s in Rainbow Valley, Missitucky, somewhere around Tennessee and Kentucky. Finian McLonergan (a twinkling Jim Norton) has arrived from Ireland with his daughter Sharon (the charming Kate Baldwin) and a pot of gold he has stolen from the leprechaun Og (the very appealing Christopher Fitzgerald). He plans to bury it near Fort Knox so it can grow and assure his daughter's prosperity.
When the McLonergans arrive, they discover that Susan Mahoney (Leslie Donna Flesner in the production I saw), is about to lose her farm in a tax sale. Susan can't speak; she "talks" by toe dancing. and Flesner's movements are indeed eloquent. Her brother Woody (Cheyenne Jackson) arrives back from the merchant marine in the nick of time with cash to safe the farm. Then when Buzz Collins (William Youmans), the flunky of the racist blowhard bad-guy Senator, demands interest, Sharon, perched in a tree, drops the cash she's brought from Ireland.
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| Kate Baldwin, Cheyenne Jackson. Photo by Joan Marcus. |
The love interest allows for some memorable songs by Sharon and Woody, "Old Devil Moon" and "If This isn't Love," among them. Kate Baldwin's bell clear soprano is the benefit you get when you case real singers in Broadway musicals, not film stars. She shines in "How are things in Glocca Morra?" Cheyenne holds his own in the production numbers, though he is too laid back to have theatrical presence as an actor.
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| Terri White and Guy Davis & Ensemble. Photo by Joan Marcus. |
Fitzgerald's "Something Sort of Grandish" and "When I'm Not Near The Girl I Love" are magical enough for any leprechaun. And Terri White's "Necessity" brings down the house. And Carlyle's choreography is inspired, from down home country to Irish jigs.
But the engaging story is not the romance, it's the clever, witty political one that attacks racism and the privileges of the rich. Buzz instructs Howard (Tyrick Wiltez Jones), a young black college student who has been hired as the Senator's butler, about how to serve a julep. He inquires, "You've seen 'Gone with the Wind,' haven't you?" The message is to shuffle, because it "makes for kindly feelings between master and servant."
Congratulating himself on buying up the local land, the Senator Rawkins (a well-cast David Schramm), speechifies, "Gentlemen, the festering tides of radicalism are upon us!" And "Forward to the sweet tranquility of the status quo." But then he discovers he hasn't gotten Susan's farm. The Senator suddenly needs a bromo seltzer, and as he pleads and groans, Howard does a riotously slow shuffle: "I's a-comin' Masa….Jus' as fas' as I kin."
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| Paige Simunovich and David Schramm with Ensemble. Photo by Joan Marcus. |
The deus ex machina is a magical pot of gold which Finian has buried. Seems it has the power to grant three wishes made by anyone standing over it. Rawkins is spouting off his usual racist blather, in this case about "the law of the South forbiddin' certain kinds of people, namely them (he points to the blacks) from buildin' homes next to certain other kinds of people, namely us. Depreciates property values."
So he's going to take land from the blacks because they are "the wrong color." At which point Sharon, disgusted, declares, "It's the world that you and your kind have made that's wrong. Oh I wish you could know what their world is like. I wish you were black…."
Since she happens to be standing over the buried gold, there is lighting, thunder, and the rotund pale-faced senator in a white vested suit becomes a portly black Senator. In the original staging, blackface was used on a single actor, but in this production, the black Senator is another actor, Chuck Cooper.
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| "Come and Get it Day." Photo by Joan Marcus. |
The politics of this play are so up to date, that Harburg and Saidy get in their licks on the matter of financial credit. It seems that with his gold, Finian is able to get unlimited credit from Shears and Robust, so the sharecroppers can buy tractors and bring in a tobacco crop. In a concession to modern sensibilities, when the farmers sing that tobacco is "easy on the throat," they cough.
My favorite number is "When The Idle Poor Become The Idle Rich," with lines like: "When a rich man doesn’t want to work, he's a bon vivant….But when a poor man doesn’t want to work, he's a loafer, he's a lounger, he's a lazy good-for-nothing." The sharecroppers sashay around the stage in the exotic costumes they have ordered from Shears and Robust.
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| L-R James Stovall, Chuck Cooper, Bernard Dotson, Devin Richards, photo Joan Marcus. |
Another show stopper, the gospel singers whom the black Senator joins, do a jazzy "Begat" number about the peopling of the world since Adam and Eve, including the revelation that "They begat" the Daughters of the D.A.R., the Babbits of the bourgeoisie and the misbegotten G.O.P.
Actually, it's pretty hard to pick a favorite when the show is so full memorable songs and clever satire. "Finian's Rainbow," rich in ideas and memorable music and lyrics, counts among the best of American musicals.
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