Bases Instinct

This didn’t just happen. One of Damn Yankees’ chief assets is that it was choreographed by the young Bob Fosse, as was the Adler-Ross show The Pajama Game the
previous year. Having the male chorus appear in baseball uniforms was a
clever idea that remains a delight, as well as anticipating the street
toughs as dancers in West Side Story two years later. For
Cortland Repertory Theatre’s new production, choreographer Daniel B.
Hess makes the jocks look like swans with cleats; they’re visually
impressive in numbers like “Who’s Got the Pain.” And the first act’s
all-male “Heart” deserves to be the show’s best-remembered number.

 

Batter up!: Joe Hardy (played by Peter Carrier) fends off the temptations of Lola (Alyson Tolbert) in Cortland Repertory’s Damn Yankees. 

 

No one who knows anything about musical theater is unaware of Damn Yankees’ several premises. In George Abbott’s adaptation of Douglass Wallop’s novel The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant,
a hapless overweight fan of the now-extinct Washington Senators, Joe
Boyd (Jef Canter in a body suit), makes a Faustian pact with the
satanic Applegate (company favorite Dominick Varney) to transform
himself into a perfect, Adonis-like 22-year-old hunk named Joe Hardy
(Peter Carrier). Young Joe’s excellence miraculously lifts the
Senators, led by Coach Van Buren (Tom Frye), to unimagined heights so
that they challenge the dominant New York Yankees for the American
League pennant. Nosy female sports reporter Gloria Thorpe (Meghan
Rozak) is justifiably suspicious. But because Joe Boyd, a real estate
salesman in life, has insisted on an escape clause so that his soul can
be withdrawn at the last moment, Applegate summons up a temptress from
hell, Lola (Alyson Tolbert), to keep him in tow.

What keeps the plot rooted in the
Ozzie-and-Harriet era is that the real love story celebrates marital
continence. Both the chubby Joe Boyd and the strapping Joe Hardy are in
love with glamorless housewife Meg Boyd (Erica Livingston). Three of
the show’s songs, “Goodbye Old Girl,” “A Man Doesn’t Know” and “Near to
You,” are devoted to this theme, although they are among the less
remembered. Whereas other productions have let the middle-aged romance
fade, director Jim Bumgardner, strong as always with comic staging,
refreshes the genuine sweetness between the Joes and Meg with the
emphatic singing voices of Canter, Carrier and Livingston. This
enhances rather than detracts from the frequent hilarity.

Yet even on the home front there is
another comic distraction: Meg’s mambo-obsessed Sister (Rebecca
McGraw), who ropes young Joe into a hospital benefit. In the original
book there were two intruding women, and the one named Sister was
played by the young Jean Stapleton (15 years before her Edith Bunker on
TV’s All in the Family) who made her reputation with it. For this Cortland Rep show McGraw sees her opportunities and grabs them.

Over the years Damn Yankees has
held off the aging process by adaptation. Part of that has been to turn
the 1950s themselves into artifact. At least two dozen lines have been
added to remind us of lost time. When asked what he’s been doing to
occupy himself, Applegate grins that he was “Out designing an Edsel.”
Blustery team owner Mr. Welch (Robert Finley) roars that he’s not going
to give greedy bonus players more money because, “After all, this is
baseball . . . not a business.” (The audience groans.) When Joe Hardy
is roped into giving commercial endorsements, he chokes while trying to
inhale Kent cigarettes.

The name of songster Jerry Ross
(1926-1955) is not on everyone’s lips as one of the golden-age Broadway
greats, but his music endures. A lung disease felled him at 29 while Damn Yankees was
still doing SRO business. For wit and allusiveness he’s a peer of Frank
Loesser; his first act’s “Blooper Ballet” compares well with “Fugue for
Tinhorns” in Guys and Dolls. Together with Richard Adler’s
naughty lyrics for the soft-shoe parody, “Those Were the Days,”
Applegate delights in the evil he has wrought, with actor Varney’s
wickedly smirking delivery bringing down the house.

As the book of Damn Yankees has
evolved through rewrites, especially with stars like Jerry Lewis taking
the role, Applegate has become the de facto lead. Maine-based Varney
makes a convincing case that the devil should talk like the late Paul
Lynde. Although we cannot know where Varney’s many improvs come from,
they bespeak an intimate conspiracy with the audience that he developed
in roles like the cross-dressing sidekick in last summer’s Leading Ladies. In his audience survey of lost lovers Varney’s Applegate wows the house with, “Look! It’s J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson!”

Two of Damn Yankees’  biggest
numbers come from characters who are tangential to the plot. The
company had to go all the way to Wichita State University for
diminutive Tom Frye as Coach Van Buren, who boasts the demeanor of a
burlesque comedian with the lungs of an opera singer for the really
masculine “Heart.” Meghan Rozak as Gloria is less adept at comedy but
musically robust in her biggest number, “Shoeless Joe from Hannibal,
Mo.”

Bumgardner’s most audacious casting
choice is Alyson Tolbert as Lola. Ever since Gwen Verdon took the role
when others refused it in 1955 it has belonged more to a dancer than a
singer. Yet Tolbert delivers with two strong suits: She‘s an
African-American performer who sings in a Broadway style. By tweaking a
taboo from 1955, Tolbert and Bumgardner enhance Lola’s temptation. In
the three-sided Edward Jones Playhouse at Cortland Repertory, you can
watch the faces of the packed audience, mostly from small towns and
cities in upstate New York. They are smiling with amusement and
approval.    

This production runs through July 18. See Times Table for information.