It would be sheer folly to stage “The Will Rogers Follies” without someone like David Lutken in the title role. The musical, which won six Tonys in 1991 (including best musical and best original score) hasn’t aged particularly well. Cy Coleman’s score is bouncy and infernally catchy (I really don’t need phrases like “Will-a-mania” and “Give a man enough rope” constantly in my head) but ultimately just so-so compared to his other hits “Sweet Charity,” “City of Angels” and “Barnum.” A lot of the show’s historical references won’t mean a lot to modern audiences, and to well-read Rogers fans like myself they only scratch the surface.
But “Will Rogers” ultimately succeeds at Goodspeed due to sheer force of personality — both Rogers’ and Lutken’s.
When it premiered 27 years ago, “Will Rogers Follies” set itself the awesome task of bringing Will Rogers back to life and making him relevant. We have to be told emphatically at the show’s outset, in a song titled “Will-a-Mania,” that Rogers was once one of the most famous people on the planet: a stage performer, movie actor, newspaper columnist, radio commentator, friend of several U.S. presidents, philanthropist and much-quoted “cowboy philosopher.”
The challenge of making this “poet lariat of the United States” seem famous again is even tougher in 2018. When Rogers makes his first grand entrance — swinging in on a rope — one way he jogs the audience’s memory as to who he once was is to evoke images of ushers scurrying down the aisles of movie theaters with buckets, collecting cash for the Will Rogers Institute. While those WRI fundraising events still happen, they haven’t involved ushers and buckets for years; it’s not the best way to evoke Rogers’ name.
But what is? Turns out it’s Lutken, who understudied the role on Broadway and on tour (when it was owned by Keith Carradine and later Mac Davis) and has now played it numerous times in New York, in regional theaters and elsewhere.
Lutken is alive and alert. He banters amiably with the audience. He’s just as cordial with his castmates, looking the chorus girls in the eye or mentioning musical director Michael O’Flaherty by name. He sings expressively, while twirling ropes or playing banjo or guitar or harmonica. He spins homespun homilies on the dangers of believing politicians or neglecting to care for the environment. He represents everything good about Rogers.
But the challenge remains. Even one of Rogers’ best-known pronouncements, “I only know what I read in the papers” (the basis for a wonderful routine of extemporaneous commentary on current events) no longer rings true. Who — present company excepted — reads newspapers anymore?
The show’s greatest liability is that it has a real story to tell, but undermines it often with stylistic shifts and the conceit that this is a show-within-a-show taking place in some heavenly here-and-now. An omniscient Will Rogers comments not just on today’s news (including wry remarks concerning Scott Pruitt, President Trump and Special Counsel Robert Mueller) but on his own tragic death in a 1935 plane crash at the age of 55.
As a biographical drama, it’s wonderfully informative. Unlike, say, the musical “Mack and Mabel” (which chronicles some of the same era), “The Will Rogers Follies” doesn’t play fast and loose with the truth. It does, however, play slow and tight with it. Whenever the show combines or revises real-life events because it’s more convenient, it backtracks, breaks the fourth wall and explains what really happened.
For instance, we are introduced to Rogers’ four children. When they return for a later scene, there’s a joke about how they haven’t gotten any older because it would be too costly to employ a set of slightly older children for each scene. Then it’s revealed that one of Rogers’ kids has actually died of diphtheria at this point in the story. Will magnanimously decides to keep the kid in the show anyway.
“The Will Rogers Follies” is full of bizarre moments like that. Sometimes they save a scene by adding unpredictability. Other times they kill the momentum. There’s always this feeling that you’re going to be swept up in a genuine emotion and then have that emotion branded as false or fleeting.
Foreshadowing becomes a fun recurring gag, with famed aviator Wiley Post (Dewey Caddell) wandering through the audience frequently to insist “Let’s go flying, Will!”
On the other hand, having announced that much of its artistry is artifice, “The Will Rogers Follies” lives up to its subtitle “A Life in Revue” by punctuating its oft-interrupted plot with rope tricks, tap dancing, big costume changes and full-cast production numbers.
It should also be said that this is one of the sexiest shows ever on the Goodspeed Opera House stage. It’s not lewd, nor is it as racy or erotic as the Broadway original, which had filmier and more glamorous costumes and even featured some discreet nudity (de rigueur at actual “Ziegfeld Follies” revues in the 1920s). But everyone in the 100-person chorus gets to strut in tight and revealing costumes, designed for maximum oomph by Ilona Somogyi (Hartford Stage’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Cloud 9”). Again, sometimes this is in earnest, as when bare thighs are glimpsed through leather chaps in a cowboy dance. But it also can lead to self-mockery as when the dancers all don white beards and low-cut red-white-and-blue outfits as an ensemble of tap-dancing gender-fluid Uncle Sams.
The most problematic character, in this day and age, is a female one that’s not even given the courtesy of a name. Branded “Ziegfeld’s Favorite” and paraded about in various stages of undress, she coos about her close relationship with the unseen Broadway producer Flo Ziegfeld (voiced by James Naughton) and seldom leaves the stage without first striking a provocative poses. Brooke Lacy, tall and strong in an Ann Miller manner, gives Ziegfeld’s Favorite about as much dignity and purpose as can be mustered for such an appalling sexist stereotype.
It’s good in a way that “The Will Rogers Follies” doesn’t take itself too seriously and exposes the emptiness and crassness of show business. Modesty, honesty, graciousness and good-hearted humor are the basis of Will Rogers’ appeal. Lutken’s natural charm and grace — also on view in Connecticut in recent years when he played Woody Guthrie in “Woody Sez” at TheaterWorks and Westport Country Playhouse — form the warm center of this vacillating revue. His genial cowpoke persona is surrounded by profound silliness, gentle political satire and flashy fashions.
Will Rogers lives. Yet so do all the things he railed against.
THE WILL ROGERS FOLLIES, A LIFE IN REVUE, directed by Don Stephenson, plays through June 21 at the Goodspeed Opera House, 6 Main St., East Haddam. Performances are Wednesday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 and 6:30 p.m. Starting May 17, there are also 2 p.m. Thursday matinees. There are no Sunday evening performances after May 13. Tickets are $29 to $79. 860-873-8668 and goodspeed.org.
