'Sophie Tucker:' They Don't Make 'em Like That Anymore

Sophie Tucker: The Last of the Red Hot Mamas

By Richard Hopkins, Jack Fournier, and Kathy Helenda; Directed by Kate Warner; Musical Direction/Pianist by Todd C. Gordon; Joseph O'Dea, Scenic Design; Frances Nelson McSherry, Costume Design; John Malinowski, Lighting Design; Rachel Padula Shufelt, Wig and Makeup Design; Meghan Fisher, Stage Manager

Featuring Mary Callanan as Sophie Tucker

Performances through July 11 at New Repertory Theatre, Arsenal Center for the Arts, Watertown, MA   Box Office 617-923-8487 or www.newrep.org

New Repertory Theatre, in residence at the Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown, welcomes summer with a cabaret style musical revue, Sophie Tucker: The Last of the Red Hot Mamas, by Richard Hopkins, Jack Fournier, and Kathy Helenda. Artistic Director Kate Warner directs and Todd C. Gordon does double duty as Musical Director and pianist for the New Rep debut of the in-demand Mary Callanan. She just wrapped up an extended run of The Great American Trailer Park Musical at SpeakEasy Stage and will be playing Rosie in the national tour of Mamma Mia! starting in September.

The talents that Mary Callanan brings to the stage are considerable. She is an experienced cabaret performer, a singer/actress with a worthy résumé of musical theatre credits, and a song stylist who is equally adept at belting and nuance. In the Boston theatre community, she is the obvious choice to cast as the inimitable Sophie Tucker and is savvy enough to know that outright imitation is not the way to go with this role. Rather, Callanan interprets Tucker and conveys her sense of the artist for the modern audience. Therein lays the issue: for anyone who actually knows or remembers what Tucker's actual sound and persona were, this iteration is lacking the bravado and the underlying sorrow which informed her comedy, as well as the "it" factor (or is it the "id?") that just made Sophie Sophie.

Callanan certainly gets the entertainer part and shares an affectionate relationship with her audience, holding them from the moment she first sashays out to the footlights, all the way through to the encore. On opening night, there was considerable hooting and hollering in response to her shtick, much of it consisting of Tucker's own stories and one-liners. Taken on its own merit, that is Mary Callanan singing great songs with great piano accompaniment from Todd C. Gordon, the show is enjoyable. However, The Last of the Red Hot Mamas is tepid, rather than red hot; smirking, when it ought to be shameless. Perhaps most disappointing is at last seeing what we've been missing when Callanan lets it all out in the finale, delivering Tucker's signature song "Some of These Days" with gravelly, unselfconscious sass, a shimmy, and a series of crossover steps. It's like we've been watching a ho-hum fireworks display for ninety minutes that suddenly erupts into colorful rocket after rocket, exploding vibrantly atop one another and lighting up the night sky for the slam, bang five minute grand finale.

I can't figure out why Callanan and Warner play it safe up till the end, but it is a miscalculation. With Todd C. Gordon present onstage to banter as Tucker's long-time pianist Ted Shapiro, Frances Nelson McSherry's outstanding evocative costume designs (right down to Tucker's ever-present chiffon handkerchief), and John Malinowski providing atmospheric lighting, the elements are there to give us Tucker in all her glory. However, perhaps in an attempt to utilize more of the spacious Mosesian Theater stage, Warner places Callanan too far upstage at a dressing table or on a red velvet settee for some songs, actually distancing her from us emotionally by the greater physical divide. She has to work twice as hard to rev things up when she returns downstage.

The second act starts out a bit stronger, showcasing Callanan's ability to belt in "The Lady is a Tramp," and adds a frisky kick in "Hula Lou." For that number, the singer ventures into the audience to trawl for a couple of male volunteers to join her onstage. On opening night, she cajoled two fellows, both coincidentally named Tom, to don grass skirts and coconut shell "breasts" and sway along with her to the island tune. I won't give away their full identities, but one is a local thespian and the other a member of the Fourth Estate, and both acquitted themselves well in the spotlight. She quickly shifts gears and comes about as close to emoting like Tucker as she does all night in "My Yiddishe Momme," one of her most famous and touching songs.

Unfortunately, these moments are too few and far between. Even as Callanan tells Tucker's back story about immigrating to America with her Jewish family from Tsarist Russia, singing in her parents' Hartford restaurant, and her journey through Vaudeville and the Ziegfield Follies to bigger and broader success, it comes across as rote, as if she were reciting someone else's bio, not sharing her own. The book explains how Sophie evolved into the assertive, self-promoting performer whose persistence and talent took her to the heights of popularity and notoriety, enabling her to endure for seven decades and influence countless singers and comediennes who came after her, but Callanan's spoken lines aren't natural or compelling enough to tide us over to the next song.   

As for the song list, there's a rich blend of familiar, unfamiliar, and other Tucker classics, including "You've Gotta See Your Mama," "There'll Be Some Changes Made," "After You've Gone," and "The Man I Love." Gordon would be any artist's dream accompanist, and he and Callanan have great timing and chemistry together. Under other circumstances, that would be enough for a cabaret on a summer's night, but there's an ingredient missing from this formula.

 

Photo Credit: Andrew Brilliant/Brilliant Pictures (Mary Callanan as Sophie Tucker)

 

To post a comment, you must register and login.