From the New York Times
The story is as familiar as
anything in the Gospels. Little girl from Nowheresville dreams of fame on the
world stage. Rebelling against a stern upbringing, she lights out for the big
time, picking up and losing a husband or two before amassing an adoring
audience. Then come the dark days, as her morals begin to melt in the hot
Hollywood spotlight: the pill popping, the bad romances and legal squabbles,
the flight from the scavenging reporters. Salvation arrives on cue, just in
time for the finale.
“Scandalous,” a new Broadway
musical about Aimee Semple McPherson, deviates from the boilerplate only in the
distinctive passions of its heroine, whose fame derived not from stage or
screen but from the pulpit. While collecting a fan base that would be the envy
of any of her movie star contemporaries in the 1920s and ’30s, McPherson was
also converting thousands to Christianity, healing the sick through the laying
on of hands, and establishing the foundations on which the modern evangelical
movement would be built.
“The
Life and Trials of Aimee Semple McPherson,” as the show is subtitled, are
actually much more fascinating than you would gather from this formulaic
Broadway musical. With book and lyrics by Kathie Lee
Gifford and music by David Pomeranz and David Friedman,
“Scandalous,” which opened on Thursday night at the Neil Simon Theater, condenses
and rearranges McPherson’s story to fit smoothly into the familiar grooves of
celebrity biography. In the process the show reduces McPherson’s remarkable
life to a cliché-bestrewn fable about the wages of fame.
Ms.
Gifford herself is something of an expert on that subject: she’s known
primarily as a perky television
morning show host with a bit of the mean girl lurking behind
the blinding smile. Recently she’s begun moonlighting: “Under the
Bridge,” a cutesy children’s musical with book and lyrics by
Ms. Gifford, was produced Off Broadway in 2005. Broadway jackals suspicious of
Ms. Gifford’s bona fides were surely hoping for an epoch-making turkey in time
for Thanksgiving. Sorry, guys. “Scandalous” isn’t so much scandalously bad as
it is generic and dull.
True,
collectors of camp might find some minor pleasures in the splashy biblical
pageants of the second act, when McPherson, portrayed with hearty gumption by Carolee Carmello, looks on with a twinkly
eye as Adam and Eve chomp from a sequined apple, or vamps as an alluring
Delilah as Samson groans in beefcake bondage.
But
these self-consciously silly sequences are actually reasonable representations
of theillustrated
sermons McPherson regularly delivered as the Sunday night
special at her spectacular Los Angeles church, the Angelus Temple. As Daniel
Mark Epstein notes in his engrossing biography, she used “the American revival
meeting’s dramatic structure to create a fluid form of religious theater that
resembled, in all but content, a musical comedy.”
Broadway
has specialized in its own lavish brand of religious theater lately: last
season we were treated to another unheavenly hootenanny about an evangelical
preacher, “Leap of Faith,” along with revivals of “Godspell” and “Jesus Christ Superstar.” And of course
that merry sendup of the oddities of Mormonism remains the hottest ticket in
town. But God and the good works (and mostly bad musicals) he inspires are
almost reduced to a walk-on in “Scandalous,” which plays down McPherson’s
extraordinary ministry and spends most of its time dramatizing the punishing
peaks and valleys of her personal life.
On a
glittery white set by Walt Spangler designed to evoke a grandiose pulpit, the
show opens with McPherson facing the toughest of her literal trials. In 1926
she and her mother were charged with obstruction of justice in relation to
McPherson’s mysterious disappearance from a Santa Monica, Calif., beach.
McPherson said she was kidnapped, and after a month of being held prisoner
escaped from her captors in Mexico. Rumormongers took a dim view of this
strange story — and its admitted inconsistencies — and suggested she’d been
holed up in a hotel with a lover.
As her
fate hangs in the balance, McPherson steps forward to narrate (and narrate, and
narrate) the story of her life, from her beginnings in rural Canada to the
pinnacle of her achievement. Highlights and low points include her rapturous
love for her first husband, the Irish-born preacher Robert Semple (Edward
Watts, of handsome face and voice), who died shortly after their marriage while
they were on a mission in China; the tangled relationship with her domineering
mother, Minnie (a stolid Candy Buckley), who largely handles the management of
McPherson’s booming career; the intimations of sexual scandal hovering around
her cozy relationship with a radio technician (Andrew Samonsky); and her
unhappy third marriage to a singer in the church, David Hutton, who’s been
given a major aesthetic upgrade: unprepossessing in actuality, he’s portrayed
by the gleamingly buffed Mr. Watts, now in a blond wig.
Ms.
Carmello, a gloriously gifted singing actress, has never managed to snag a
star-making breakout role on Broadway — not all that surprising in these
difficult days for musical theater. Sister Aimee certainly provides plenty of
opportunities for Ms. Carmello to thrill us with the purity and power of her
voice. She leads a few rousing come-to-Jesus gospel-tinged numbers with
bright-beaming intensity. She delivers the climactic soul-baring ballad with
plenty of emotional heat. What she cannot do — no singer without the power of
miracle could — is bring distinction to songs that never rise above the
serviceable.
And
while Ms. Carmello persuasively charts McPherson’s journey from innocent from
the sticks to impassioned healer to disillusioned celebrity, Ms. Gifford’s book
never really makes us see why McPherson had such mesmeric power over her
followers, and only sketches in the details of her tremendous hold on the
popular imagination in the years of her fame.
The
mystery of faith healing is, of course, not an easy thing to dramatize. It may
be just as well that “Scandalous” does not include a chorus line of sinners
tossing their crutches into the wings and making like the Rockettes after
Sister Aimee has laid a hand on their crippled limbs. But it might be a lot
more fun — and certainly more memorable — if it did.
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