“I don’t think there can be any doubt that ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’ is a post-coital number,” says Richard Greenberg of the most famous song in Rodgers and Hart’s Pal Joey. “So we’ve put it in bed. Why not?”
The 34-year-old Greenberg, chronicler of upscale urbanite angst in plays like Eastern Standard and The American Plan, seems an unlikely adapter of John O’Hara’s book about a two-timing, fast-talking singer. But his reworked story for the Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart show, commissioned by the Jujamcyn Organization, drew critical acclaim when it was presented by Boston’s Huntington Theatre in September.
It hasn’t always been so. Since its Christmas premiere in 1940, Pal Joey has had a mixed reception. Its sexual frankness was like vinegar to some fans of the sugary Broadway musicals before World War II. Critic Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times wrinkled his nose and conceded, “If it is possible to make an entertaining musical comedy out of an odious story, Pal Joey is it.” A 1950 cast album prompted a reassessment and a successful revival two years later, when even Atkinson joined the consensus that Pal Joey had broken new ground.
But, says Greenberg, as daring as O’Hara’s book was for its time, it doesn’t hold up well. “Pal Joey is a pre-Oklahoma! musical with post-Oklahoma! ambitions,” he says. “It’s a show in which there’s a kind of nascent seriousness, but the techniques hadn’t been developed yet to make that flourish. It’s a legatee of the musicals of the ’20s and ’30s, which means that the score had a really loose connection to the book.”
When director David Warren approached him last year about refurbishing Pal Joey, Greenberg excitedly seized the project. “People think of it as a dark, sort of tough piece,” Greenberg says. “Actually, it’s only fitfully that in the original.” Greenberg’s revision keeps the love triangle but scotches O’Hara’s clunkier plotting. Some characters have been combined or cut, and the personality of Joey, the nightclub-singing hustler central to the plot, has been deepened.
“A case in point—we’ve reinserted a song called ‘I’m Talking to My Pal,’ which was cut from the original,” says Greenberg. “The number seems to be the culmination of Joey’s character, but the story has taken so many detours and plot shortcuts that you understand exactly why it was cut.” The new Joey is more clearly a desperate, rootless soul shaped by the Great Depression. “This is a guy who’s looking for a home. He gets kicked out of every place because he screws up, and because people find out about him and see through him. He is determined to establish himself and not screw up this time. And he uses the techniques he knows.”
Among those techniques are a glib tongue and a gift for manipulation, characteristics of Greenberg’s most recent protagonist, the fiction writer Keith in The Extra Man, staged at the Manhattan Theatre Club last May. The parallel is not accidental: Greenberg worked on The Extra Man and the book for Pal Joey simultaneously.
“I’ve said that Keith’s gift is for creating truth in the moment. And it’s a truth that becomes true even to him,” says Greenberg. “I think that was how we started with Joey—this guy who makes it all happen, makes it real as it happens.”
The resurrection of Pal Joey is Greenberg’s first real foray into musicals, and although he has gone back to straight plays for now, Pal Joey has left its mark. “Usually I manage to gather four people in a restaurant, and it’s a play,” he says with a rolling laugh. “This project made theatrical size attractive to me.”
Edward Karam is a theatre writer based in Frankfurt, Germany.
