At one point in The Will Ragers Follies, the cowboy humorist (Keith Carradine), making folksy jokes about world events, refers to the town of Nice: “That’s pronounced neece,” he says, “the French don’t have a word for nice.” Well, if you want nice, this show is it: the nicest, most agreeable musical on Broadway. The question is, is nice enough? In making a musical biography of Will Rogers, the show’s creators-book writer Peter Stone, composer Cy Coleman, lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green, director-choreographer Tommy Tune-have chosen a format so retro it’s positively daring. They call it “A Life in Revue, " which works out to be a kind of “This Is Your Life” with songs and showgirls. These Broadway veterans, gambling that audiences are starved for simplicity, sweetness and sex, have supplied all that, but it’s not quite enough.
The show’s conceit is that we’re watching a brand-new edition of the Ziegfeld Follies in which Rogers comes down from showbiz heaven to guide us through his career. Dressed in Day-Glo cowboy duds, twirling his famous lariat, drawling his prairie pensees, the totally appealing Carradine evokes a fascinating American life: the part-Cherokee Oklahoman who became a folk hero as a stage performer, movie star, radio personality and political commentator, both a scourge and a friend of presidents. The problem is that the life is merely evoked, not dramatized. The book’s major event is Rogers’s undying love for his wife, Betty (see? nice), and the only conflict is Betty’s complaints about her globe-trotting hubby’s protracted absences. This kind of thing can’t drive you mad with excitement.
What may drive you, if not mad at least giddily grateful, is Tommy Tune’s staging of the Ziegfeldian numbers. With the tragic deaths of Gower Champion, Bob Fosse and Michael Bennett, Tune is pretty much alone as Broadway’s major choreographer. Aided mightily by Tony Walton’s elegantly extravagant sets, Willa Kim’s knockout costumes and Jules Fisher’s metamorphic ligbting, Tune raises whimsy to pure wit as he deploys his chorus lines. The boys are amusing clones of Tune himself, tall chaps in chaps tapping like Tommy guns. The girls are the most beautiful on a Broadway stage in a very long time. Tune handles them with prefeminist Ziegfeldian zing, choreographing not only their lissome torsos and high-rise legs but also their hands, elbows, even their madly innocent smiles. With carefree impudence he has them explode in salvos of sighs and giggles, both embracing and satirizing Ziegfeld’s solemn oath to glorify the American girl.”
If tapping chaps or high-kicking girls are not your thing, there’s also a dog act. There’s even one of those “living tableaus” (of Custer’s Last Stand) that were created for Ziegfeld by the memorably named Ben Ali Haggin. And Betty (the winning, warm-voiced Dee Hoty) sings a number sitting on a moon, a reference to Ziegfeld’s noted set designer Joseph Urban. By evoking all these elements, this show aims to return to a simpler time, a time when showbiz could mean stunning women and a folksy, funny populist. Rogers was the precursor of political comics like Mort Sahl. Now, when Jay Leno, Johnny Carson and David Letterman provide a nightly obbligato to the news, Rogers’s skeptical barbs still seem weirdly pertinent. At the show’s climax we hear a radio speech he gave during the Depression at the request of President Hoover, in which he talks with compassionate common sense about a system in which “10 men could buy the world and 10 million can’t buy enough to eat.” As he speaks, the house lights go up-which they did whenever Rogers talked to the audience in the Follies. But this moment of seriousness and intimacy is too late to override the easy, sentimental path the show has taken. The score and lyrics might have leaped a few magnitudes if Coleman, Comden and Green had turned this affecting but prosaic scene into transforming music and words. If the character of Rogers had been handled with as much punch and theatricality as Tommy Tune’s dance numbers, “The Will Rogers Follies” could have gone beyond nice and headed straight for great.
