Donna McKechnie.
By Hap Erstein
Some of us measure time by the careers of stage stars. It has been 50 years since Donna McKechnie’s Broadway debut, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, where she appeared as an office worker dancing Bob Fosse’s quirky steps.
It has been 35 years since A Chorus Line opened on Broadway, winning her a Tony Award as the quintessential musical theater dancer. And 10 years since she appeared at Delray Beach’s Crest Theatre with her one-woman act of reminiscences, Inside the Music.
This weekend, McKechnie returned to South Florida with an in-development new act dubbed My Musical Comedy Life, for three performances at The PlayGround Theatre in Miami Shores. Like that earlier cabaret act, it is chiefly an anecdote-and-song stroll through her career which would appeal to anyone with the Broadway habit.
By my almanac, McKechnie is now 68, but she looked smashing in a flowing, low-cut red gown. No, she does not dance much in the act, the singular talent which rocketed her to stardom, but she sings pleasantly enough, has some enjoyable stories to impart and wins over the audience on her personality and endearing charm.
After a shaky opening with faux-spontaneous patter that felt too written, McKechnie scored with a recreation of her first Broadway vocal audition (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum’s I’m Lovely), her three-part approximation of her showstopper from Company (You Could Drive a Person Crazy) and a couple of affecting numbers from Follies (Don’t Look at Me, In Buddy’s Eyes), which she performed in a Paper Mill Playhouse revival.
Of course, A Chorus Line was the show’s centerpiece, represented by a rendition of Inside the Music, the “rangy” first draft of what would become The Music and the Mirror. That number followed, but the dance at its core was reduced to a few spins and poses.
Also conspicuously absent from the evening was any mention of McKechnie’s marriage to her prime choreographer, the late Michael Bennett. She made a fleeting reference to the pains of “arthritis and divorce,” but had obviously made a decision to not go into her relationship with Bennett, as she had in her earlier act and her autobiography.
That’s too bad, because the omission was all too evident to those familiar with her life, who are surely the act’s target market. Still, My Musical Comedy Life is sufficiently entertaining and deserves to hit the cabaret or performing arts center circuit, and to come back to the area for a longer engagement.
MY MUSICAL COMEDY LIFE, The PlayGround Theatre, 9806 N.E. 2nd Ave., Miami Shores. Closed Sunday.
Todd Allen Durkin, Ken Clement, Barry Tarallo Shane Tanner, and Ryan Didato in The Irish Curse.
(Photo by George Schiavone)
Too many plays are only about what they seem to be on the surface, while the better ones rise to the level of metaphor. Martin Casella’s support-group comic drama surely wants to be among the latter, but never persuades us it has more on its mind than the male member.
Yes, The Irish Curse has a penis fixation and, while that is an organ of considerable fascination, it turns out not to be interesting enough to fill a 90-minute evening of theater.
According to Casella, the titular curse is a ethnic tendency of Irish men to have abnormally small sexual organs. From there, it is a quick leap to envisioning a support group where guys congregate to express their feelings of inadequacy over their, um, shortcomings. OK, even if the stereotype were true, it would still be a stretch to imagine a handful of dudes sharing their innermost thoughts on the subject.
Or maybe it could be a satisfying evening of theater – there were, after all, those Vagina Monologues, weren’t there? – but Casella may not have been the right writer to manage it. Instead we get a lot of one-note jokes on the subject early on which segue into maudlin hand-wringing over how five characters with a teeny-weeny problem have let it damage their lives.
The site is a Brooklyn Catholic church community room, effectively designed by Douglas Grinn, where Father Kevin Shaunessy (Barty Tarallo) meets each week with a rotund lawyer separated from his wife (Ken Clement), a young sports doctor-in-training who fancies himself a ladies’ man (Ryan Didato) and a gay undercover cop (Shane R. Tanner), united by the same malady. Naturally, as plays like this go, a new element is injected into their midst, a relatively recent immigrant from Ireland (Todd Allen Durkin) with his own tale of woe to spill. About to be wed, he is driven to harm himself to avoid matrimony because of his tiny johnson.
Squint and you can sort of see how the situation could stand for a more universal sense of inferiority or low self-esteem, but the writing remains so prosaic that the audience will have to do the work to get there. The cast, under the solid direction of Avi Hoffman, does what it can, but there is not enough here to hold interest for an hour-and-a-half.
THE IRISH CURSE, Mosaic Theatre, 12200 West Broward Blvd., Plantation. Through Sunday, March 6. Tickets: $37. Call: (954) 577-8243.