“Direct from one year on Broadway” read a decorative signboard at Signature Theatre, where Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s 56-year-old “Allegro” — a musical memory feast if ever there was one — had its official opening Monday.
“Tonight we’re making history,” director Eric Schaeffer announced in a shadowy stance onstage beforehand, thanking Dena Hammerstein, the show’s producer and widow of Oscar Hammerstein’s late son Jamie, who had long hoped to revive the musical in fresh form as a tribute to his father. The original production, which debuted with great fanfare on Broadway in the fall of 1957, disappointed critics who didn’t quite know what to make of the experimental approach used by the famous composer-lyricist team.
Mr. Schaeffer has streamlined the mostly forgotten classic considerably with the help of such New York pros as writer Joe DiPietro and arranger Jonathan Tunick. The original cast of 99 has been reduced to 14; an orchestra of 15 musicians is down to 10. Scenes have been rearranged, lines sharpened, choreography dropped, new thematic emphases added.
The result greatly pleased Mrs. Hammerstein, who said the choice of Mr. Schaeffer was largely because of his ability to reduce musicals to their essence. “When I heard he was going to do without sets, I was sure,” she enthused at a post-performance champagne-and-chocolate party in the lobby.
“It’s very romantic, very life-affirming,” offered actress Hayley Mills (star of an early 1960s favorite, “The Parent Trap”), a friend of Mrs. Hammerstein’s.
“It’s real theater. There are no amateurs here,” commented theater patron Malan Strong. Retiring Kennedy Center Chairman James A. Johnson accompanied wife Maxine Isaacs, a member of Signature’s board, but played dumb to the question of who would succeed him after his official step-down day Tuesday.”You mean who is the new and improved version?” he joked.
Among the not-so-usual patrons turning out was Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, father of the production’s assistant director, Lee Armitage. Mr. Armitage senior pleaded ignorance about this particular show in the Rodgers-Hammerstein canon, saying instead, “If it’s Sondheim, I know it.”
Time doesn’t stand still, whether it’s a dramatic musical portraying 35 years in the life of a Midwestern doctor (the “Allegro” outline) or a popular director on the move. Mr. Schaeffer left town the next morning at 7 for his engagement for Disney directing a live version of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” which opens Feb. 22 on Broadway.
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