Everyone who loves baseball — and hates a certain pinstriped perennial world champion — is predisposed to love “Damn Yankees,” the landmark 1955 musical that celebrated the triumph of the underdog Washington Senators, while proving sports and musical theater can make great teammates. Not to mention Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon.
I never tire of watching the Yankees lose. So I attended Town Hall Arts Center’s new staging wearing my Boston Red Sox cap as a sign of solidarity with my Yankee-busting on-stage brethren.
What followed was an entertaining evening of swings and misses. “Damn Yankees” is one of those great musicals — with its clever book and toe-tapping score — where not everything has to work just right to make an enjoyable evening out of it. But Town Hall has set a high standard for itself, and it can do better than an ordinary effort like this one.
Russell Mernagh, recently of Town Hall’s “Rent,” continues his leading-man emergence as Joe, who, in a fit of middle-age melancholy, makes a Faustian deal with the devil for the chance to spend a season as a 22-year-old baseball god.
My late father went on and on about attending opening night of “Damn Yankees” on Broadway, when members of the real Yanks joined actors on stage for a raucous curtain call. Verdon’s devilish performance, highlighted by the sizzling showstopper “Whatever Lola Wants,” was one of those seminal pairings of singer and song that people talked about for decades.
Ronni Gallup, who has grown up on Colorado stages, has a lot of Verdon in her — legs and lashes as long as the day, and a sultry gaze that can turn a man to salt. She doesn’t have Verdon’s fangs, and her Lola doesn’t attempt those dizzying dance moves, but Gallup owns the very attribute that let Verdon get away with playing a marriage-wrecking succubus more than 50 years ago: a comic sense of play.
Director Robert Wells’ scattershot staging serves up a few fun numbers, like the harmonizing “You Gotta Have Heart” and “Shoeless Joe from Hannibal Mo.” But mostly, these are dancers who are just trying to keep up, rather than reinvent the form.
This staging never feels authentic in character or period, and the acting is a constant struggle with tone, with most actors choosing caricature over character. It’s undisciplined in spots.
Only Mernagh and Margie Lamb, as the loyal wife Joe left behind, seem to be taking this whole thing at all seriously. Shakespeare, this is not, but there can be a powerful emotional undertone to the story of a man who leaves his wife when the devil grants him his youth (and a suddenly improved singing voice). The story’s premise leaves wife Meg (Lamb) struggling with something of an emotional triangle between her deeply rooted love for the old Joe (Tim Fishbaugh) who abandoned her, and her emerging appreciation for the younger, more handsome and newly enlightened younger Joe who is living under her roof.
Our devil is played by Eric Mather, one of the funniest improvisational comics in Denver. But playing a role that hams like to eat for lunch, Mather wears a permanent scowl, most often checking his innate charm and silliness in favor of a surly kind of bellicosity. When Mather finally does bust loose and have some fun, taking huge liberties with the reprise of his big number, “Those Were the Good Old Days,” it’s out of place.
There are other issues and incongruities: The first act meanders; the finish plays out in a frantic rush. And while set, of course, in Washington, you’d think these were the Minnesota Senators, given the inexplicably affected Midwestern dialect these townspeople have adopted. The music is prerecorded, and the costumes are haphazard and incongruous.
The players wear cheap jerseys that look hot off a shirt-shack griddle: Some have names and numbers; some have neither. No major-league team in 1955 would have been donning jerseys with names on the backs. And, unconscionably, cynical reporter Gloria (an excellent Mary McGroary) is introduced to us wearing the jersey of the very team she is charged with covering.
So, it’s sloppy. But baseball is a sport where you have only to hit .300 to make the Hall of Fame. And despite any reservations, the appeased crowd left whistling a happy “You Gotta Have Heart.”
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
“Damn Yankees” **1/2 (out of four stars)
Presented by Town Hall Arts Center. Written by Richard Asler and Jerry Ross. Directed by Robert Wells. Through June 19. 2 hours, 30 minutes. 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays. $23-$40 (limited $10 seats one hour before each show). 303-794-2787 or
