opening-night review of *Singin' in the Rain*

at Spokane Civic Theatre through Oct. 29

It’s the finest movie musical of all time. Why should any theater, much less a nonprofessional theater, take on the challenge of attempting to produce *Singin’ in the Rain*? We’ve all got dreams of Gene Kelly (wet) and Donald O’Connor (wacky) imprinted in our collective memory. Going up against near-perfection: It’s a losing proposition.
Isn’t it? No. Three reasons: Cameron Lewis throwing around his rubber limbs in “Make ‘em Laugh.” Alyssa Calder-Day stepping up to the mike and selling the romance of “You Are My Lucky Star.” Lewis and Calder-Day joining Andrew Ware Lewis in the tap-leap-glide of “Good Morning” — a threesome dancing their hearts out, flopping joyously onto a couch, looking like they were actually having fun up there.
Live theater has the element of risk that make its triumphs that much more impressive: The singer who has to hit that note right now; the three people tapping in sync, taking it to the limit but flirting with pratfalls; the choreographed comic stunt that’s gotta be right and gotta be now. Back in 1951, they took six months (and lots of multiple takes) to film Singin’ in the Rain. Not only did they have a safety net, they lacked the immediacy of an audience chuckling, gasping, applauding.
So the attempt is worth it; unfortunately, the result, in Kathie Doyle-Lipe’s production of the musical’s stage version, is uneven. Among this show’s lead actors, technical elements and individual numbers, there are both triumphs and mediocrities.
But more triumphs. Foremost among them: Cameron Lewis in the Donald O’Connor role of the goofy sidekick, Cosmo Brown. Lewis — he’s Pee-Wee Herman with a deep voice and rubber limbs — has mastered the arch remark served with a side of sarcasm and a goofy dance kick. His version of “Make ‘em Laugh” won’t make anybody forget Donald O’Connor — but who could? Lewis dons a Viking helmet, spills out of a cart, splits a seam or two, performs a frantic Russian dance, throws himself around like a rag doll, loses a fight with a dummy, pirouettes in and out of control, convinces us that one of his legs has a mind of its own, and … it’s exhausting just watching him. Combine all that with tapping and singing, smirks and one-liners, and you’ve got the evening’s best performance.
Calder-Day invested “You Are My Lucky Star” with genuine feeling, and her dancing, especially in “Good Morning,” is delightful. She’s capable of projecting that girl-next-door quality.
Her efforts are accompanied by this show’s many other delights. Dougie Dawson combines cigar-chomping, skittery feet and a hunched-over, side-mouth cackles to create a memorable portrait of the dim-wit studio head. Doyle-Lipe keeps the stage busy with extras. In a scene involving multiple takes with a prickly film star, Tom Heppler adds a note of comic exasperation as the director. Susan Berger and Jan Wanless do their usual great job with costumes, especially at the high end of the elegance scale: an ice cream suit for the movie heartthrob, various mink stoles, a mustard-yellow, sequined gown for the dumb-blonde actress. And in a number called “You Were Meant for Me” which calls for the hero to dazzle his girl with all the special effects on a movie set, technical director Peter Hardie pulls off spotlights, mist and moonlight.
The buzz on this show was the multimedia angle, that Hardie was going to pull off, not only multiple sets and the wherewithal for big tap numbers, but even old-timey motion pictures and actual rain right there on the Civic’s Main Stage.
The movies are successful; the rain, less so. Here’s why: The movies, because they’re spoofs of all the ham acting in the old silent films, are amusing because they call attention to their own limitations. The rain, trying hard to impress us, undermines the musical number it’s supposed to support. In a movie, we expect rain — that’s what studios do. But in a live production, it’s an event. Which is the problem: the rain itself becomes the focus. The Gene Kelly character doesn’t care about getting wet because he just left his girl and he’s falling in love. It’s an exuberant, devil-may-care love song.
But the rain spatters hard, and Ware Lewis stains to be heard; pretty soon, the title song becomes a stunt to be gotten through instead of a love song to be savored.
In Ware Lewis’ defense, it takes courage just to get up and swing around that lamppost (and not only because, in this production, it’s a scary-wobbly lamppost): He’s imitating an icon of American cinema. But they sacrificed emotion to logistics on this one, folks: How it got done took precedence over the scene’s emotional substance.
The silent-film spoofs, in contrast, were marvelous: hammy expressions, jerky swordfights inside our own Masonic Temple, and success at the complicated business of roughening up the footage when the plot calls for unsynched sound and other technical glitches. In the film sequences, the comedy served the play: Don and Lina really do look silly up there acting silently in a world that’s gone talkie.
*Singin’ in the Rain* isn’t remembered for the strength of its plot (aside, perhaps, from the way the Lina’s awful voice is handled as a device). The plot — a love triangle-plus-goofy-sidekick arrangement set just when the talkies were taking over from silent movies — is literally a pastiche, thrown together as a means of patching together a bunch of songs taken from any number of Depression-era musicals.
*Singin’*, moreover, presents large swaths of unmemorable singin’: Of the dozen songs listed the program, I don’t remember three of them. At all. And I’m writing this an hour after the show ended, and I took notes.
There are other problems as well. A second-act recording-studio sequence (dubbing over Lina’s awful voice with Kathy’s pleasant one) seem belabored. A half-century ago, in the movie, the details of how dubbing is accomplished may have seemed novel; today, they’re common knowledge.
With all the uncooperative props and flown-in effects that seemed to have minds of their own in this show — and with all the scuffling-about onstage and some lengthy set changes — it became evident that a musical of this magnitude was taxing the limits of what the Civic is capable of doing. The seams showed.
As Lina Lamont, the silent-film star with a voice … not fit for talkies, Corinne Logarbo isn’t nearly squeaky enough at her first vocal entrance. Logarbo comes into her own in the second act’s “What’s Wrong With Me?” — flaunting her charms flirtatiously and in general taking her characterization nearly over the top. It’s a climb she should have made in the first act. When the shock of Lina’s screech-voice and sheer stupidity needs to be felt most, Logarbo didn’t bring enough energy to the role.
As Don Lockwood (the Gene Kelly role), Ware Lewis generally dances better than he sings, and sings better than he acts. In the tap duets and trios, it’s Ware Lewis that your eyes go to: His feet glide, his arms undulate, he’s under control and a pleasure to watch. He can deliver a convincing love song, even if his voice faltered in the lower register during the reprise of “You Were Meant for Me.” During the silliness of “Moses Supposes,” however, Ware Lewis’ face took on a blank affect — a kind of pasted-on smile perched atop a lithe and graceful dancer’s body. His gee-whiz reception of the first mention of the over-dubbing idea was flat — where his two companions seemed excited by the idea, Ware Lewis overdid the straight-man routines.
With up-and-down moments like those, the leading quartet of actor-singer-dancers in this show was made seriously uneven. Now, “uneven” is an easy word to throw around: Nearly every show has strong points and weaknesses. But the disparities are glaring here. On the one hand, things like Ware Lewis’ tap-dancing, Lewis’ physical comedy, Calder-Day’s lyrical tone were all standouts. On the other hand, the flatness of some of the joke-deliveries, along with the flaccidness of the big tap numbers and the colored-umbrellas finale, were eye-rollingly bad.
The Civic’s *Singin’ in the Rain* is an uneven show.