NEW YORK – Nine years ago, Old Globe manager Tom Hall and artistic director Jack O'Brien were sweating bullets. They had just invested $1.1 million of the theater's hard-to-raise dollars on a seasonal Dr. Seuss musical and they had no idea if their first-ever holiday show would fly.
CRAIG SCHWARTZ
Looking like the whimsical book come to life, the cast gathers for the grand finale of the Old Globe's ninth edition of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!"
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Fast-forward to 42nd Street, 2006.
Last week alone, the same show, enlarged and glammed up for Broadway, took in more than that cool million. During its 12 weeks here, playing 12 shows a week, “Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas! The Musical” looks likely to earn a weekly gross that could surpass even the top-earner “Wicked.”
Back home where O'Brien's sweet-and-sour production has become a San Diego favorite, the take was considerably smaller last week, but the payoff in goodwill these last nine years has been enormous: Some 250,000 people have seen the show, including – roughly – 100,000 school kids for free or reduced prices.
The sight of those little ones squealing and applauding and leaving wide-eyed with wonder after what for many is their first experience of live theater – well, it's enough to make the heart fill and the eyes brim, no matter how Grinchy you feel when you walk in.
Audrey Geisel, the widow of Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) who died in his adopted town of San Diego in 1991, gave the Globe the rights to the grumpy green character for the show featuring music by Mel Marvin, with book and lyrics by Timothy Mason.
DATEBOOK
"How the Grinch Stole Christmas!"
Through Dec. 29 at the the Old Globe Theatre, Balboa Park; $25-$49; (619) 23-GLOBE or www.theoldglobe.org
"Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas! The Musical"
Through Jan. 7 at the Hilton Theatre, 213 West 42nd St., New York; $25-$99; (212) 307-4100 or www.ticketmaster.com
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Her various Seuss enterprises get no fees from the Globe's original production. Conceived with visual fidelity to the Seuss drawings and palette by designers John Lee Beatty (sets) and Robert Morgan (costumes), the musicalized “Grinch” retains the slightly naughty spirit of the popular children's book, right up until the tear-jerking “Santa for a Day” ballad in which tiny Cindy-Lou Who first softens the heart of her larcenous Christmas-hating visitor.
The short rhyming story becomes the basis for most of the dialogue, which is framed by a doggy narrator, Old Max. He lopes down the aisle and opens the show, his back to the audience, wagging his huge, furry tail.
Like that laugh-getting first image, the 70 minutes that follow are a showcase of showman O'Brien's trademarks, some as old as the hills and all abetted by John DeLuca's choreography.
Little puppets briefly sing carols from their bulbous homes in Whoville. Cindy Lou's joyful Who parents and grandparents jive like a Top-40 close harmony quartet. And the titular villain deadpans, ad-libs and gets a vaudevillian soft-shoe (with a whip!), his crossover to “One of a Kind” turning that spotlit ode to self into a Judy Garland moment.
Manhattan critics recognized the tongue-in-cheek genius of O'Brien's approach, linking the musical back to the children's book and to the best of its previous transfers to other media – the 1966 Chuck Jones TV special from which one of the musical's songs derives. (That's Albert Hague's “You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” with the addition of Hague's “Welcome, Christmas” on Broadway). Since “Grinch” premiered at the Globe in 1998, the bloated, awful Jim Carrey film has come and gone.
At New York's Hilton Theatre, the stage show boasts a commanding Grinch in Patrick Page, a Shakespearean actor who's hammed it up as the villain Scar in “The Lion King” and brings malevolent elegance to his Grinch. His clarion baritone, as several critics have pointed out, conjures the hissing drawl of Cyril Ritchard as Captain Hook. And at a recent matinee, packed with schoolkids and families, he time and again pulled the screaming wee ones into his spell with gleeful threats and double-takes.
San Diego favorite Rusty Ross made the trip the Great White Way, friskily reprising the Young Max role he originated at the Globe and looking right at home amid the New York stage veterans. Those include a wonderful, pink-cheeked John Collum as Old Max. With decades of classical credits and throwaway charm, Collum phrased the rhyming, chiming dialogue with the breezy ease of an old pro.
The pit orchestra has the union-agreed 15 musicians (there are nine at the Globe) for a lush Broadway sound; the chorus is bigger, too, and Beatty's sets have doubled to fill the wide Hilton Theatre stage with black-and-white trees on the proscenium and revolving Who houses that resemble giant turnips. There's plenty of snow and a big explosion of red paper fireworks.
“I like everything about the Broadway production,” said Audrey Geisel from her La Jolla home, “especially the way they're giving you more of Whoville to fill the big stage without losing the intimate feel of the show.”
There's still some tentativeness in the pacing at the Hilton, where the show was supervised by O'Brien and staged by his protege Matt August. Along with Geisel, the lead producer is Running Subway Productions.
What's really different, though, is the commerce surrounding the production, visibly sponsored by Target stores. Strolling vendors hawk Grinch keychains and dolls in a theater configured to send the departing crowd into an all-Grinch lobby shop where gleeful parents were dropping bundles – just like the giddy Whos of “Last Minute Shopping” onstage.
Though the Globe won't take home any profits from all that merchandising, the venerable theater does have “a small financial stake in the Broadway show,” said Globe executive director Louis G. Spisto. “We get the same kind of percentage in the royalty pool as with other shows we've transferred to Broadway.” That percentage ranges from .75 percent to 1.5 percent of the weekly “Grinch” gross, which last week topped $1 million.
Back at the Globe, the ninth installment of the show has the feel not of Yankee Stadium or Disneyland as on Broadway, but of a beloved San Diego tradition.
Designer Beatty recently created a big Seussian evergreen for the Globe plaza, decorating it, like the end papers of the book, in red, white, black and a passel of pinks; that tree announces the slightly askew, vaguely subversive (and therefore kid-pleasing) imagination of the inimitable Dr. Seuss.
The new Globe Grinch (actor Jay Groede) comes on histrionically like that other green-faced, yellow-nailed meanie, the Wicked Witch played by Margaret Hamilton in the classic “Wizard of Oz” movie. Many notable newcomers enliven the “Grinch,” which has stolen thunder from holiday shows at smaller San Diego theaters though it's also served as a launching pad to Equity (the actors union) jobs for local performers.
Groede and Ryan Drummond, new to the role of Young Max, show sharp comic timing together, their shtick hip, legible and effective. Drummond sings and howls with booming confidence, amid a vocally strong cast of Whos led by the sweet, richly textured singing of Scott Drier as J.P. Who.
Debuting at the Globe are Sarah Sumner as a prim, pucker-mouthed Mama Who and Randall Dodge in the ensemble; she made a strong impression at San Diego's Starlight with her spot-on deadpanning as Little Sally in “Urinetown,” while Dodge is a gifted character actor and singer from Moonlight in Vista.
The kids at a recent Globe morning show were from a half-dozen schools, chaperoned by teachers and those unsung heroes, the moms. At most schools, one of those PTA stalwarts had connected to Arts Bus Express, a laudable San Diego-countywide program that raises money to schlep students to performances all over town .
O'Brien often argued that taking small shows out to school auditoriums was a less effective introduction to theater than bringing children to a professional theater with all the specialness and magic that entails. He dreamed of finding a way to bring kids to the right Globe show. Nine years later, those busses pulling into Balboa Park – and 3000 miles away to an 1,800-seat theater off Times Square – have the look of a dream come true.
Anne Marie Welsh: (619) 293-1265; anne-marie.welsh@uniontrib.com
