Mame in Concert

MAME in Concert: Dallas News review

‘Mame’ charms ‘the husk right off of the corn’ at Lyric Stage

There’s nothing like a dame, particularly one like Mame. When the indomitable heroine of this hit-packed 1967 Jerry Herman musical is broke and has been fired from yet another job, she pulls out the tinsel weeks early because “we need a little Christmas/right this very minute.”

The plot may be improbable as we follow Mame’s financial ups and downs in Lyric Stage’s production at Irving Arts Center,  but under the wise, understated direction of Penny Ayn Maas, the emotions in the songs that range from witty to wrenching, are true and uplifting.

Which is why, from the moment the fabulous 38-piece Lyric Stage Orchestra began playing the swoon-worthy overture under the unerring baton of Jay Dias, my brain, which had been cluttered with concerns of the day, transported, realizing: ”We need a little Mame/right this very minute.”

And oh, how the company delivers. Julie Johnson’s Mame powers the show with a big voice and heart in the role of Mame, a rich bohemian whose life is turned around when her brother dies, leaving her to take care of her nephew Patrick, played by the extraordinary, charming Jack Doke who, incredibly, is the same age — 10 — as the character he plays. The battle, not dissimilar to the one Herman would revisit in the 1983 Broadway blockbuster La Cage Aux Folles, is to raise a child who is inclusive, open and curious (“Open a New Window”). To pull this off, Mame has to face off against the rigid executor of Patrick’s father’s estate (James Williams), who represents the forces of conformity. He pushes Patrick’s enrollment in a boarding school and, as Patrick grows up, encourages his interest in a privileged and snobbish young woman.

The large cast spills over with performers who could star in their own right. Christopher Sanders, who starred in Lyric Stage’s South Pacific in 2015, brings his rich baritone to Mame’s beau, Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside.  Daron Cockerell, who starred in Lyric’s Annie Get Your Gun in Concert in 2015 and Anything Goes in 2016, steals her comic scenes as Agnes Gooch, an initially repressed nanny who points to Mame as the reason for losing her inhibitions. Operatically trained baritone Trevor Martin, an apprentice artist with the Fort Worth Opera who played a supporting role in Lyric’s Anything Goes, wows with feeling as the grown up Patrick, whose evolving relationship with his aunt proves key to the tale.

The show is performed in concert, which means that you won’t get elaborate sets and that the performers share the stage with the orchestra, but with the orchestra being the stars they are in their own right, you’ll enjoy seeing them there, too.   So if you need a little Mame, hurry. The musical runs through Jan. 29. It’s good for what ails you and if nothing ails you, it will fortify you for tough times to come.

MAME in Concert: TheaterJones review

Window Opened

Lyric Stage has a brilliant full-orchestra concert version of Jerry Herman’s Mame, which is more subversive than you remember.

Wayne Lee Gay

Irving — Composer and lyricist Jerry Herman, now living in retirement in Florida, has been at his best, in his long career, when translating—and personalizing—America’s culture wars into tunefully entertaining Broadway shows. This weekend, Lyric Stage in Irving brings back one of Herman’s masterful distillations of American life with a beautifully performed and produced concert version of Herman’s 1966 hit show Mame.

Herman’s most obvious treatment of the conflict of the left and the right came with La Cage aux Folles in 1983, wherein the self-appointed guardians of morality clash hilariously (and tunefully) with the world of open sexual expression and gender ambiguity. The friction of the forces of oppression and liberation are less obvious and more subtle in Mame, but present nonetheless in this tale (based on a real-life memoir) of the bond between an orphaned boy and his free-living guardian aunt. While audiences in 1966, surrounded by the daily noise of student protest, the sexual revolution, and the civil rights movement, hardly noticed the social content of Mame, this musical resonates in 2017 as the nation once again experiences the confrontation between forces of oppression and liberation.

One is apt to forget about all of that, at least consciously, as the gorgeously crafted melodies roll out, one after another, within the impeccably structured drama of Mame. While this production is clearly labeled “in concert,” the neatly efficient staging, given focus by a gently curving staircase (with orchestra and conductor onstage) puts the spotlight clearly on Herman’s brilliant songs and the smooth structure provided by playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Rober E. Lee. Herman here produced a goldmine of enduring hit songs, including “Open a New Window,” “We Need a Little Christmas,” and the grandly celebratory title number. The equally memorable—if slightly less well-known—“If He Walked into My Life Today” turns the traditional Broadway lost-love ballad into a parental lament of separation; the deliciously bitchy duet “Bosom Buddies” features a tantalizing opening motif that turned up again fifteen years later as the starting point, before heading in a different direction, for “We are what we are/I am what I am” in La Cage.)

Of course, any production of Mame centers around the title role (created in 1966 by Angela Lansbury); here Julie Johnson embodies the life-loving Mame with calm energy, a smooth vocal rendition, and the right combination of hedonism and maternal instinct. A consistently strong cast also includes Amy Mills as Mame’s side-kick Vera Charles, Christopher Sanders as Mame’s great love Burnside, and Tervor Martin, who brought along a noticeably fine lyric baritone voice, as the grownup Patrick. child actor-singer Jack Doke held up well as the young Patrick, returning at play’s end as the grown-up Patrick’s son. Among smaller roles, Deborah Brown was clearly an audience favorite, and deservedly so, as the crusty, cantankerous Mother Burnside.

For this audience member, however, the sit-up-and-listen performance came from Daron Cockrell as the dowdy nanny Gooch, with a distinctive voice that soared in several high-pitched, quick-vibrato belted moments. Though there’s not much room for subtlety in this role, Cockrell’s strong vocal performance helped create a strong presence.

Stage director and choreographer Penny Ayn Maas made every movement count and kept the audience totally engaged, and Jay Diasconducted with a strong sense of style and momentum. As always at Lyric Stage, this performance featuring full, professional, acoustic orchestra proved both entertaining and revelatory.