Broadway revival lacks life

Although Jerry Herman has made a name that glows in Broadway's musical history with Hello Dolly!, Mame and the gay, barrier-breaking La Cage aux Folles, his Mack and Mabel is relegated to the status of also-ran and not-that-well.

John Doyle's elegantly down-sized revival constitutes a brave attempt to reassert Mack and Mabel's importance as a key, characteristic work of Herman's, with its emphasis on troubled, romantic love and tough survivors who kick, and sometimes high-kick, against life's big pricks.

Doyle has carved a small-scale, studio musical from a major, Broadway creation, with versatile actors now serving as the band, some playing several instruments.

Yet despite the skill with which the director has replicated the style of his applauded version of Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, Mack and Mabel emerges as no more than a set of Herman's poignant or jauntily old-fashioned songs.

Francine Pascal has revised Michael Stewart's original book. Even so, the narrative and songs describing how Janie Dee's surprisingly pallid Mabel Normand stumbles into the silent-movie location of David Soul's Mack Sennet and then into a volatile love affair with him proves undramatic and undeveloped.

Herman says Mack drove Mabel to drugs booze and ruin. In this musical, though, the director does not even walk her to these ends, let alone drive.

Mark Bailey's design encloses the silent-movie-making world within a wire-meshed compound, with a bridge above it.

The performers, from Matthew Woodyatt's Fatty Arbuckle on euphonium, double-bass and percussion to Richard Brightiff on trumpet and trombone as a rival director and love interest, dashingly caper. They capture the fun, innocence and frenzy of silent-movie-making: original clips are beamed out on a muslin curtain.

Soul, being about three decades older than the age when Mack met Mabel in real life, distorts the erotic balance. He makes it seem as if the fledgling actress succumbs to a sexless, big Daddy figure.

Eyes hooded and rarely focusing on the object of Sennett's desire, Soul sings and acts with cautious blandness as the man who, in the wistfully ambivalent and beautiful I Won't Send Roses, never conveys the oddness of someone convinced that life could be edited and controlled like a silent movie.