Review: Love Is All You Need
Diane Sobolewski
A highly prolific American novelist and sports writer, Paul Gallico (1897-1976) had a rather intriguing relationship with Hollywood; while one can't say it fired on all cylinders John Grisham-style, several movies adapted from his work are considered modest classics. There's Pride of the Yankees (1942), the Lou Gehrig biopic that won Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Actor and Actress the following year. The much loved (in its day) Hayley Mills/Disney flick, The Three Lives of Thomasina (1964), was adapted from feline-lover Gallico's Thomasina: The Cat Who Thought She Was God. And in 1972, The Poseidon Adventure solidified the success of a new film genre that ran rampant the rest of the decade and beyond: disaster movies.
All of these are, in one way or another, fairy tales—as is Lili, the whimsical 1953 film about the romantic triangle that develops between an orphaned naïf who joins a carnival and the two men she finds there, a disabled and embittered puppeteer and an alluring, magical lothario. Set in post World War II France, it's adapted from Gallico's Saturday Evening Post short story, "The Man Who Hated People" (which he himself reworked into the novella Love of Seven Dolls). Reportedly, the idea was born out of Gallico's admiration of the TV show "Kukla, Fran and Ollie," although his homages were far darker psychologically than anything "Kukla" creator Burr Tillstrom devised. Hollywood took a more family-approved, audience-pleasing, love-conquers-all route with Lili, casting the gamine Leslie Caron in the lead and the tall-and-glowery Mel Ferrer as Paul, a character so damaged he can only express his true feelings through his puppets.
Though not a musical, the movie won an Oscar for its score, which included the endearing and enduring song "Hi Lili, Hi Lo"—so naturally, it wasn't long before Broadway producer David Merrick figured out how to make this story all-singing and -dancing. Directed and choreographed by Great White Way stalwart Gower Champion, Merrick's Carnival! ran for 719 performances following its April 1961 debut, replacing "Hi Lili, Hi Lo" with the indelible "Love Makes the World Go 'Round," earning a Tony Award for its star Anna Maria Alberghetti and giving Jerry Orbach ("Law & Order"'s Lennie Briscoe) his first Broadway lead.
Despite its initial success, Carnival! has never enjoyed a revival. Its "long-lost" quality is part of what makes it perfect fodder for a revamp by East Haddam's Goodspeed Musicals, and as is often the case, the transformation of Goodspeed Opera House's peewee stage for this production is cagily astute. Designer David Gordon has produced a playful set with backdrops that look like children's drawings (our favorite is the mournful seaside image, all dark waves and cloudy sky), adding a versatile, seemingly 2D jungle gym of ladders, rings and monkey bars that allows a progression of acrobats to do their airborne thing while leaving adequate room for the play's ground-level action. Kudos also go to choreographer Peggy Hickey (whose previous work on Brigadoon and On the Twentieth Century won Connecticut Critics' Circle Awards) for a couple of lively ensemble numbers, "A Sword & A Rose & A Cape" and "Cirque de Paris Ballet."
Such rollicking eye-candy serves to deflect attention from the fact that the central story plays as pretty weak sauce. The movie Lili excised Gallico's original conception of his puppeteer's character as somewhat sadomasochistic and perhaps suffering from multiple personality disorder, and built in trippy fantasy sequences that emphasized the story's fairy tale quality—leaving the audience to wonder, are Paul's puppets just puppets, or are they real people after all? In contrast, Carnival! is curiously unmagical, filling the spaces between the Big Musical Numbers with a lot of gratuitous bickering between the three principal characters. It takes charming actors to make this folderol palatable, and Goodspeed's got 'em. As Lili, the innocent girl who comes to the carnival looking for love, Lauren Worsham has one of those open faces that recalls a young Deanna Durbin (her pipes are especially Durbinesque) and projects a winning balance of innocence and pluck—though on occasion she makes Lili seem so naive you wonder if the poor child is one taco shy of a combination platter.
Mike McGowan plays Marco the Magnificent, a magician who cavalierly steals Lili's heart, in such deliciously sleazy fashion you're half-disappointed he doesn't twirl his mustache. But it's Adam Monley, as Paul, who pulls off the really tough job—making the audience care about a character who's essentially unlikable, while showing some serious aplomb as a puppeteer. Despite the hokum, Carnival!'s conclusion is a heart-tugger, in the best musical tradition. As is the all-cast rendition of "Love Makes the World Go 'Round" at curtain call.
Carnival! runs through Sept. 18 at Goodspeed Opera House. For more info, call (860) 873-8668 or visit goodspeed.org.
Review: Love Is All You Need
