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This bewildering show by Stephen Cole (who conceived, wrote, and co-directed it) and Bob Richards (choreography and direction) purports to pay homage to the eternally youthful headliner of South Pacific, Peter Pan, and The Sound of Music on Broadway, Annie Get Your Gun on tour, and Hello, Dolly! abroad (among numerous others). But despite the presence of some two dozen tunes from Martin's musicals, and a killer trio of singing actresses (Cameron Adams, Lynne Halliday, and Emily Skinner) for the vocals, no one involved seems interested enough in anything Martin actually did. A solid half of the numbers on display have been reimagined into grating unrecognizability, as though the very notion of their original formats would be too foreign for our ears to even process. (As a reminder, Martin lived from 1913 to 1990.) All three women, for example, join together to do "Most Gentlemen Don't Like Love," "Kiss the World Goodbye," and "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" (relocated, inexplicably, to the end of the action) in Andrews Sisters-trio format, which makes it impossible for us to even try to embrace Martin's kittenish sexuality. The lazy, undulating "Swattin' the Fly" (from the out-of-town flop, Dancing in the Streets) is rendered by Skinner as a comedy song for no reason I could discern. There's no trace of cagey defiance in Halliday's version of One Touch of Venus's "I'm a Stranger Here Myself," and her suavely swinging "A Cockeyed Optimist" is at odds with the lyrics' unblemished, unashamed outlook. As for "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My hair," which Adams, in a low-cut black dress by costume designer Patricia McGourty, delivers with a bottomless Bob Fosse slink, the less said the better. Other re-envisioned moments edge nearer, but even the best of these—"I Shoulda Stood in Bed" (Nice Goin'), "I Got Lost in His Arms" (Skinner, at her smokiest)—play, by dint of David Krane's soupy arrangements for the three-piece band (led by pianist Lawrence Goldberg), as second-tier nightclub material, not tunes intended at all for the theatre. What's worse is that none of this conveys a stitch about Martin, and often practically mocks her work into oblivion. Why "Shapes," from the 1953 Ford 50th Anniversary special was given to Jason Graae, the sole male performer, to mince his way through I can't answer; nor do I understand why he appears with an Ethel Merman puppet in a tedious "Lonely Goatherd" Bill Baird fantasia. What no one does is the one thing that would seem required: try to analyze, or perhaps even replicate, Martin's intelligent, girlish verve—it is, after all, what she traded on (and, eventually, subverted) for her entire professional life. If you're trying to show how Martin adapted her persona for a deceptively wide range of portrayals this needs to be acknowledged, as it's a huge chunk of the work she left behind on video and film. It's not that it's the aspect that gets short shrift—it gets no shrift at all. The strongest scenes and performances come, not coincidentally, when there's no shying away from Martin's achievements: a genuinely charming, no-frills Peter Pan medley, and a trio of numbers from I Do! I Do! that peg Martin's deceptively wide range using all three women but never make fun of the material. Three biographical montages, charting Martin's childhood and adolescence in Weatherford, Texas, early Hollywood career, and final years are refreshingly honest, funny, and camp-free in depicting Martin as a flesh-and-blood human. If Cole's goal was to explore the impact of Martin and her shows as filtered through to the current generation, he hasn't achieved it; nor has he done anything to kindle new interest in Martin for people who might not be familiar with her accomplishments. And, sadly, true connoisseurs won't have much to gnaw on: The sole Pacific 1860 song is one Martin didn't even sing (and is rendered by an over-the-top Graae playing Noël Coward), there's nothing from Lute Song, and nearly all of her TV work, including turns in Born Yesterday and The Skin of Our Teeth, is ignored. No biographer on this sort of project could include everything, of course, but one who really wanted to do justice to her career—and thus to her—could fit the stuff in by deploying fewer flights of flouncing fancy than Cole has. As it is, Inventing Mary Martin's heart is in the right place only occasionally. The rest of the time, you're left feeling that it doesn't know—or care—much about the subject it's presenting but is, instead, a stranger here itself.
Inventing Mary Martin
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