Rendering № 6

The editorial published on February, 13 is headlined “Jerry Herman interview: Are we finally ready for this mad, mad world?” It  carries a lot of comments on a rare flop from the great Broadway composer Jerry Herman gets its British premiere tonight – 44 years after it first opened.
It begins with a discourse that it’s not uncommon, towards the end of a monumental career, for the giants of musical theatre to want to put their house in order. The editorial reports at length that Andrew Lloyd Webber has been busy filming his shows for posterity. Stephen Sondheim has seen Merrily We Roll Along come good and even the unloved Road Show revived if not resuscitated.
Giving appraisal to the situation, it’s necessary to point out that Dear World was first performed in New York way back in 1969, but when it resurfaces at the Charing Cross Theatre this month, it will be the show’s British premiere. Forty-four years seems like a long wait for a musical from the witty composer-lyricist who, in Hello Dolly (1964) and Mame (1966), had given Broadway two wonderfully frothy entertainments. Indeed, in Dear World Herman completed a trilogy of shows featuring eccentric, rule-breaking heroines. The reporter also discusses the fact that the show was adapted from Jean Giraudoux’s play The Madwoman of Chaillot, which tells of a countess who, driven mad by the loss of her lover, dwells in the basement of a Parisian bistro and embarks on a plot to stop a powerful corporation drilling for oil. Herman had acted in the play (in the role of a deaf mute) as a university student in Florida.
There is every reason to believe that the score was also part of the issue. Where Louis Armstrong made Hello, Dolly his own and Bobby Darin covered Mame, the songs from Herman’s more integrated score for Dear World are less detachable from their context, although I Don’t Want to Know for a while enjoyed a second life in Liza Minnelli’s cabaret set. It’s interesting to emphasize that It didn’t look like a show about big oil featuring sewers. Nor did it help that Cohen insisted on Dear World at least looking like a Jerry Herman show with high-kicking chorus lines.  The correspondent quotes Cohen as a proof these words : “It was overblown in every way. We had a producer who wanted to be a Barnum where it should have been an intimate production.”
It’s worth mentioning that The death of Dear World did not remotely discourage Herman from experimentation. In Mack and Mabel (1974) he told of unromantic hero who, as the song warned, “won’t send roses”, and he stole from operatic convention to kill off his luckless heroine.
Besides, there is every likelihood that if we have more of a palate for wackiness nowadays, Lynne is also confident that she’s located the right Countess Aurora. Betty Buckley was the original actress singing Memory in Cats on Broadway.
The correspondent concludes the article with Herman’s statement : “I’m so open to experiment with my work. I love it when people have new ideas. It always leads to learning. I don’t learn anything by going to see an exact copy of what I’ve done before. But I do learn when somebody does something a little daring, a little offbeat with it. And I welcome change.” He also express his willingness that And this time, perhaps an audience will also welcome an improving musical which gives a bloody nose to bankers.
As for me, this article has awaked my interest in theatre and in this play in particular. I think that this play and so called premiere is very symbolic and may prove its author to be the real genius in this field of art.