Theatre in Review: Golden Rainbow (York Theatre Company/Theatre at St. Jean's)

	Benjamin Pajak, Max von Essen. Photo: Rider R. Foster

Show fans who have been yearning for the good old days of fun-bad musicals shouldn't miss this 1960s artifact, a star vehicle that had a decent run and then vanished, living on only in myth and legend. Time was when Broadway was loaded with such also-ran entertainments, plagued with squishy books but blessed with lively scores and solidly professional casts. These shiny, easily disposed-of toys often lost money but they usually left behind highly listenable cast albums. They also made Broadway an infinitely more amusing place.

Golden Rainbow is a particularly tantalizing title, as it was featured, notoriously, in The Season, William Goldman's scorching report on the fallen state of Broadway circa 1968. (Show me a theatre fan who hasn't worn out at least one copy and I'll show you a liar. I read it every couple of years.) Goldman documents how the source material, Arnold Schulman's 1957 stage comedy A Hole in the Head, was ground to a pulp because Eydie Gormé -- wife of Steve Lawrence, Golden Rainbow's leading man -- needed a co-starring role. (In one of The Season's juiciest details, Goldman notes how the creative team added fake spontaneous breakup moments for Gormé, a natural nervous giggler, to make it look like she and Lawrence were having a marvelous time onstage. In the words of Roxie Hart, "That's showbiz.")

Schulman, who had already spent time in the Broadway musical barrel while working on the disastrous Mary Martin vehicle Jennie -- which started out as a bio-musical about the great Laurette Taylor and ended up being about nothing at all -- was long gone by the time Golden Rainbow opened, replaced by Ernest Kinoy. The composer-lyricist Walter Marks has done a thorough revision of his own, rearranging and replacing songs and adding a major character and subplot. But he hasn't solved the show's big problem: a central conflict that makes no sense.

Widower and full-time loser Larry Davis owns the Golden Rainbow, a "boutique" motel -- basically a fleabag with water beds. A dreamer with a hundred dashed schemes in his past, he is forever chasing after bizarre one-off projects -- like a desert ice rink inside a geodesic dome -- that he just knows will make his fortune. Meanwhile, customers are scarce (except for three nonpaying showgirls), the mortgage is overdue, and Larry's eleven-year-old son Ally is busy keeping the wolf from the door. When $5,000 is needed to avoid eviction, Larry wires Judy, his sister-in-law, for the money, claiming Ally is critically ill. Judy, a steely, unmarried buyer for Lord & Taylor -- and the keeper of a legacy her father left for Ally -- frantically hops a plane to Vegas; realizing on arrival that she has been conned once again, she makes an offer: She'll give Larry the cash if he will let her take Ally back to New York, where stability and a good education await.

If you stare very hard at Golden Rainbow, you can see a potent emotional triangle that, combined with the gritty/glittery Vegas atmosphere, could make for a flashy, fun laughter-and-tears evening. But the book has major focus problems. If it establishes the father-son bond well enough, it also makes abundantly clear that Larry is a washout of a parent with little prospect of improvement; then again, Judy is cold, judgmental, and not terribly likable, even if she keeps announcing her deep affection for Ally. Faced with the prospect of the kid going off with either of them, I'd opt for calling Child Services and ordering up a foster home. Although it is obvious that Larry and Judy will have to get together -- there is no other possibility -- the show postpones their romance to the last possible moment, resulting in an emotional U-turn that baffles. (Personally, I give them six months.) Instead of trying to flesh out this situation, the show gets sidetracked by side issues like the ambitions of Larry's Mafioso business partner Carmine Malatesta and a new subplot, about a failing diner, that provides a flagrantly unbelievable deus ex machina.

Still, Stuart Ross' fast-moving production provides a solid showcase for the score, which offers at least a half-dozen gems. They include a corker of an overture, driven by musical director David Hancock Turner's furious piano; the kicky, school-of-Bacharach opener "24 Hours a Day;" a couple of brassy torchers for Judy ("He Needs Me Now" and "How Could I Be So Wrong"), and a roof-raising lament, "Matter of Time," for Jill, who runs the diner next door. Even the lesser numbers have a jaunty, let-us-entertain-you quality that keeps the atmosphere lively.

The cast glitters with talent. Max von Essen's natural charm goes a long way toward neutralizing Jerry's most venal qualities; he even rescues the first-act finale, "I've Gotta Be Me," from its fallen status as a lounge-act perennial, rightly recognizing it as the inner thoughts of a man about to betray his son. Van Essen also has a lively connection with the preternaturally gifted child actor Benjamin Pajak as Ally. In a production loaded with high-powered belters, Mara Davi, as Judy, takes top honors; she also has a solid grasp of the music's period style, capturing the trumpetlike, precisely enunciated delivery of songstresses like Gormé, Barbra Streisand, and Lana Cantrell. She gets plenty of competition from Danielle Lee Greaves' rousing "Matter of Time," which solidly stopped the show at the performance I attended. As Carmine, who is busily constructing a casino with a fall-of-Babylon theme, Robert Cuccioli sells the weak comedy number "Taste," pulling laughs out of thin air. (The score's show business spoofs, "King's Virgins" and "Dr. Thunderfinger" are pretty dire, taking valuable time away from the main story.)

This being a Musicals in Mufti production (meaning limited rehearsal time and bare-bones design), Golden Rainbow nevertheless offers an inventive projection design by Peter Brucker. including a montage of neon signs and a witty spoof of a Maurice Binder-designed James Bond film credit sequence. Bruckner also supplied a solid sound design. Garett Pembrook's lighting is an equally pro contribution. In any case, it is a prime Mufti project: an unrevivable show with a score of some quality delivered by a skilled cast in a sleek tab production that gives us a sense of what the original was like. Musical theatre fans will pounce, keeping the theatre packed for this attraction's brief run. --David Barbour