'My Favorite Year' No Favorite Of Critic

'My Favorite Year' no favorite of critic

By CHRISTOPHER POTTER

NEWS ARTS WRITER_______

Now we know: All those nasty things those mean New York theater critics wrote about "My Favorite Year" were all too true.

Give director-choreographer Ronald P. Baumanis and his Ann Arbor Civic Theatre cast an “A” for application in striving to bring this mediocre musical fizzing to life last night at Civic’s PlayHouse. The action rarely abates in this period-piece homage to live-television comedy, adapted from the 1982 movie of the same name.

No matter how fast you push it though, the show is still dead weight. Ironically, the film offered all sorts of possibilities in its Neil Simonesque 1950s tale of a young TV comedy writer entrusted with the care, feeding and sobering up of his boyhood idol - an Errol Flynn-like swashbuckler star now on the skids.

‘ The movie served up chuckles and poignance in the relationship between fuzz-faced Benji Stone and boozy matinee idol Alan Swann, a surrogate hero for Benji’s own family-deserting father. These were the days of live TV, and no show was more lively and laugh-filled than the King Kaiser Comedy Cavalcade -the movie and musical’s stand-in for Sid Ceasar’s “Your Show of Shows.”

While the film was no master-work, it caught much of the flavor of those manic years of Saturday-night television mayhem. It also lent insight into hero worship and the quixotic interplay of idealization and reality.

"My Favorite Year” the musical wisely commences from the perspective of a middle-aged Benji reflecting back upon those crazy days of 40 years ago. One couldn’t hope for a better actor-spokesperson than Civic’s David Andrews, who can look both young and old and whose Benji is an authoritative/vulnerable ball of energy.

Benji serves as a kind of orchestrator for the show, pulling the strings of long-ago acquaintances or having his own self manipulated as a talented yet nervous ingenue star. The show’s very title bespeaks its theme: that America was once a more innocent place, a fun place, more energetic than world-weary, cynical and jaded.

It’s a powerful motif. But “My Favorite Year” creators Joseph Dougherty (book) Stephen Flaherty (music) and Lynn Aherns (lyrics) never summoned forth the talent or iffe moxie to bring it off.

True. Aherns’ rhymes are superior, to Flaherty's forgettable tunes and to Dougherty’s sloggy script. But there’s nothing first-rate about a musical that could have been something special. It seems crafted by artists who themselves were World-weary, cynical and jaded.

The same can’t be said of Baumanis and a Civic cast of 25 go-getters. Andrews makes an ideal ringmaster-participant, a boyish charmer in the mode of a young Robert Morse. His sincerity is hap-

REVIEW

pily matched by Amanda Satchell as secretary and love interest K.C. Downing. The latter frets she’s “not funny enough” for Benji, then turns positively ecstatic when she realizes she’s made a joke.

So "serious” that she’s funny, Downing is wonderful going one-on-one with Andrews in the oddly titled yet sweetly lyrical “Shut Up and Dance.”

She’s several notches better than Gina Frillici, who plays Benji’s overbearing Jewish mom Belle with far less of the tarantula smother Lainie Kazan brought to the movie and the musical.

Alan's dinner at Benji's is thus denuded despite a hilarious group number, “Welcome to Brooklyn,” bellowed by a mob of relatives and friends who pile into the apartment to ogle Belle’s movie-star guest. Troy D. Sill’s Alan seems more attuned to Leslie Howard than Errol Flynn; yet Sill is by turns so sturdily comic, vulnerable and stalwart that one wishes his character had been given more to do.

That’s one of the show’s major handicaps: Rather than watch Alan’s madcap drunken antics, we hear about them later. A climactic Comedy Cavalcade sword fight does take center stage, yet is given a feminist twist that’s so wildly misbegotten it undercuts the effect of Alan’s ascension from a Hollywood fraud to a true-life hero.

Baumanis does lovely things with the Comedy Cavalcade itself. Tech men vigorously operate make-believe television cameras, the huge letters NBC loom above the TV-proscenium stage, ON THE AIR winks over to the left while the show’s orchestra holds forth in Civic’s right-side balcony.

Performers including a “Lucky Stiff’ cigarette-pack dancer dither about, none more mightily than David Burkam’s mock-tyrannical King Kaiser. If Burkam’s hectoring, gesticulating boob-tube star is more reminiscent of Jackie Gleason than Sid Ceasar, it hardly matters. Sharon Sussman is suitably peppy and catty as Alice Miller, King’s onetime Catskills partner-turned writer - though Alice’s pre-billed “show-stopper” number, “Professional Showbizness Comedy” fails to halt anything.

Still, one can’t accuse anyone in this production of not putting out. Note Jimmy Dee Arnold’s total, craggy immersion in the small role of the Cavalcade stage manager, or Ben Tabios’ delighted goofing as Belle’s husband, a Philippino exboxer ("You might say/It was love at first fight...”).

This is clearly a happy cast, glad to be singing and dancing and prat-falling regardless of their material. Maybe that ebullience is worth the price of admission.

"My Favorite Year" runs through Sept. 21 at the Civic PlayHouse, 2775 Platt Road.Curtain is 8 pm Thursdays-Saturdays. For information, call 971-2228.