Will Mack and Mabel EVER work on stage?

I've never seen a production, and I understand this show is plagued with major book problems, but I find this score irresistable. Every number, for me, is near perfection. It's a shame the book doesn't measure up. Do you think it will ever be fixed?

Updated On: 12/23/05 at 12:43 PM

I think it's a case of subject matter. It's really a dark, sad story that the writers are unwilling to let be dark or sad. It's a great score, but one that in many ways is inappropriate to the stroy.

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I don't know the book well enough to critique. But every article/book I've read sites the book as the major issue.

I feel the same way you do about this, Bobby. I've never seen a production, but I've become a fan of the score, which I think is adorable. From what I've read, the subject matter is a big part of the problem, as Danielm pointed out. The story is very dark. Mabel Normand started out as a popular and promising performer who wound up drug addicted and dead by her mid-thirties, and Mack Sennett was completely obsessed with making two-reelers, even after they'd become passe to the industry. Trying to create some sort of star-crossed lovers story out of this doesn't really work if you look at it in any realistic way.
Maybe those who have been in productions and made the book work as well as it could, could enlighten us about aspects of the show that really do work well. From what I've heard, Herman's wonderful score carries it along but to an unresolved and unsatisfactory conclusion.

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Well Mack and Mabel, Pacific Overtures, Merrily We Roll Along and Anyone Can Whistle, nmartin...

It would be great if someone could get 'Merrily' to work.

It was BobbyBubby, but did it work? Did it succeed?

Sadly, not.

It was a limited run, in a non-commercial venue. You can't really apply succeed to limited runs. Pacific Overtures would never be revived by a commercial producer.

Well, it is a true story.

No, I'm just saying you can't completely change it...unless you fictionalize it.

I really wish it would...and would stick around for a while, as it's easily one of my favorite scores of all time.

I think the biggest problem with the show is that although the story is very dark and dim, the slapstick movie sequences necessary and the big, brassy score are not. So therefore, those things tend to remove the audience from the essentially dark drama that goes down in the show. In short, the show feels inconsistent.

How much weight my opinion holds is debatable, as I've never seen it performed, but I've read the original unrevised script and heard both recordings, and from what experience I've had with it, that seems to be the biggest problem.

I do think the show, while bookheavy at times, is very good. I think its failure deserves to be blamed on, forgive me, Gower Champion. He tinkered with the show so much that by the time it left California (where it got stellar reviews) and arrived in DC it had been so tinkered with that the show had been lost in the fixing.

They mounted a tour of this way back in the late 70's with Jon Cryer as Mack, Lucie Arnaz as Mabel and Tommy Tune in the Lisa Kirk role. It was spectacular. The costumes were great, they gave Tommy Tune a "Leading Player" from Pippin edge and as William Desmond Taylor is shot, Tune comes into view atop a riser leading the whole chorus in "Tap your troubles away", And the ending was "Tweaked" so that Mack states the fact that Mabel dies, But has a WHAT IF moment and it ends with he & Mabel getting married as the overature plays again and with keystone cops in tow, it is all done without words a la the silent movie. I saw that production four times and it was bliss! This show can work, and very well, with good stars and very minor tweaking.

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