When the Burton Lane and E.Y. "Yip" Harburg musical Finian's Rainbow first appeared on Broadway in 1947, it was considered fresh and charming, even innovative. The score was chockablock with tuneful gems, and the book featured a kind of progressive politics and commentary that made the show more than just a pleasant diversion.
The show enjoyed a profitable run of 725 performances, but has since sort of disappeared, apart from two very brief revivals in the '50s and '60s, and the occasional limited run, such as the 2004 stint at the Irish Repertory Theater with Malcolm Gets and Melissa Errico.
Conventional wisdom has been that Finian's Rainbow had become unrevivable, at least for an extended commercial run, because of a plot twist in the show in which a bigoted southern senator is turned black as a sort of expiation of his chauvinistic sins. Overly sensitive audience members might consider this offensive, or at least be afraid that someone somewhere might find it offensive, even if they themselves did not. Good old liberal guilt.
Since opportunities to catch this show are rare, I was pleased to see that the folks at Encores had included it as part of their current season. But when I caught the show last weekend, I found it to be unaccountably dull and unengaging.
It's certainly not the score that was the trouble. Is there a more appealing collection of tunes in the musical theater canon? Every last number is a gem, from the jazzy "Old Devil Moon," to the jaunty "If This Isn't Love," to the lyrical "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?" There are also charming and funny character numbers, including "Something Sort of Grandish" and "When I'm Not Near the Girl I Love." And there are also terrific crowd numbers, such as "The Great Come-And-Get-It Day" and "When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich." There's not a single dog in the bunch, although a number of the songs have questionable relevance to the plot.
And the cast was about the best you could hope for, led by the ever appealing Kate Baldwin and the always reliable Cheyenne Jackson as the show's central lovers, Sharon and Woody. Plus, there was the adorable Jeremy Bobb as Og, the leprechaun, and Tony winner Jim Norton as the titular Finian. And director Warren Carlyle kept the proceedings moving, so it wasn't as though the pace was dragging.
Which leaves us with the book. Oh, that book. It's as creaky as the Tin Man's knee, at least as adapted here by David Ives. I've noticed over the past year or two that, when I've had issues with Encores shows, it usually had something to do with the book. Perhaps they've been cutting these shows down too much, at the expense of clarity and character development. That certainly seemed to be the case with Finain's Rainbow. So when I got home, I broke out my copy of the original libretto, by Harburg and Fred Saidy. And I found that Ives had cut quite a bit of the book, so much that certain numbers, such as "The Begat" and "Necessity," came seemingly out of nowhere. Ives also seems to have excised much of the character development that had made these people appealing in the first place, particularly Sharon and Woody.
So, when I heard this week that there were plans afoot to move Finian's Rainbow to Broadway in the fall -- most likely at the St. James Theater, after the limited run for Desire Under the Elms is finished -- I was dismissive at first. But the more I read through the original book, the more I thought that a decent, entertaining production of the show might be possible, provided that they restore more of the original libretto, or perhaps incorporate changes from the adaptation that the late, great Peter Stone created for the Irish Rep production.
But even if they can make the show work, I have my doubts as to whether there will be sufficient public interest in the show to make a commercial production viable. It's one thing to wow the "in" crowd at City Center. It's another thing entirely to attract enough of the general public to make a Broadway run profitable. Heck, if frickin' Gypsy with frickin' Patti LuPone can't manage more than 332 performances, what makes producers think that Finian's Rainbow is going to lure the crowds in? In a recession, yet.
