David Cassidy in the News
180 degrees of separation
Thursday, February 16, 1995
"Blood Brothers' a grim tale, not deftly told
By Robert Hurwitz
San Francisco Chronicle
You don't need to worry about giving away the ending to "lood Brothers." Worry instead about surviving its long litany of ham-handed premonitions with your love of the theater intact.
Playwright-composer Willy Russell's musical about English class conflict and doomed twins opened Wednesday at the Golden Gate Theatre as the third offering in what's turning out to be a dismal Best of Broadway season. Not that "Blood Brothers" isn't a legitimate Broadway hit. It's well into its second year in Manhattan, and seventh successful season in London. Go figure.
It wasn't always so. Russell ( "Educating Rita," "Shirley Valentine" ) had a local hit with the show's first staging in 1983 in Liverpool - his hometown and the setting of the story - but it closed after a short run when it transferred to London. It wasn't until Bill Kenwright, a fan of the first production, and his co-director Bob Tomson remounted it in 1988 that it took off, perhaps because the sagging Thatcherite economy made the show seem like timely social protest.
The New York production has thrived largely on the box office pull of its stars. Petula Clark and David Cassidy, who headline the touring version at the Golden Gate, boosted its sagging sales when they stepped into the Broadway show last summer. (Clark's role is now being played in New York by Helen Reddy, who replaced Carole King. Do you detect a pattern? Is Dusty Springfield available? Melanie, anyone?)
No, Clark and Cassidy don't play the twins of the title. Though that might be interesting. Clark is Mrs. Johnstone, a working class mother of seven, deserted by her husband, with twins on the way. In desperation, she agrees to give one of the twins to her employer, the childless and - it turns out - fearfully possessive Mrs. Lyons (Priscilla Quinby).
Thus, Mickey (Cassidy) grows up poor, badly educated and with increasingly limited possibilities. His twin Eddie (Tif Luckenbill) grows up rich, sheltered and secure. Fatally - there's enough fate in "Blood Brothers" for a dozen Greek tragedies, with plenty left over - they become childhood best friends, despite their mothers' foreboding efforts to keep them apart. They also grow up in love with the same former playmate, Linda (Yvette Lawrence).
The tragic result is telegraphed during Russell's brooding drone of an overture. The cast gathers around two dead bodies as Joe Atkins' lights bathe Andy Walmsley's set in dripping reds. Clark sings the opening lines:
"Tell me it's not true. Say it's just a story." And the Narrator (Mark McGrath) steps in to deliver the immortal lines:
"So did y' hear the story of the Johnstone twins? / As like each other as two new pins, / Of one womb born, on the self same day, / How one was kept and one given away? / An' did you never hear how the Johnstones died, / Never knowing that they shared one name, / Till the day they died, when a mother cried / My own dear sons lie slain."
Even without Russell's seemingly endless and repetitive score - basic rock ballad with a heavy beat - the quality of his lyrics is a dead giveaway. By midway through the first act of this 2-hour, 45-minute slog, you're almost as sick of his strained rhymed couplets as you are of that incessantly intrusive and ponderous Narrator.
But hey, tragic foreshadowing worked for the Greeks, didn't it? It worked for Shakespeare. It worked for Stephen Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd," to which some
"Blood" boosters have compared Russell's work. There's no comparison. The supple lyrical mastery of Sondheim's opening lines tells all:
"Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd. / His skin was pale and his eye was odd. / He shaved the faces of gentlemen / Who never thereafter were heard of again. / He trod a path that few have trod, / Did Sweeney Todd, / The Demon Barber of Fleet Street."
Russell attempts to build tragic inevitability out of crude, if apt, bits of economic determinism and trumped up superstitions that appear awkwardly invented for the occasion. Like the one about twins separated at birth:
"They say that if either twin learns he was one of a pair, they shall both immediately die."
Then he throws in the Narrator as a one-man Greek chorus. Although instead of fulfilling the chorus' function of considering and commenting upon the action, his Narrator just keeps repeating lines like "You know the devil's got your number" - sung with heavy significance - and interfering in the action to the point where you wish one of the occasional bobbies would bust him for harassing the two mothers.
I wouldn't hold this against McGrath. Smarmy arrogance seems built into the role, and McGrath at least sings his part - such as it is - with a strong voice and what looks like misplaced confidence. Clark is winsomely effective as the downtrodden Mrs. Johnstone, with enough grit and glimmers of inextinguishable optimism to remain reasonably interesting. Her voice is more than up to the demands of Russell's score, with sparks of dynamism that make you wish she were singing something else.
Cassidy's Mickey veers from an over-cutesy portrayal of childhood to an oddly stilted, over-emoted notion of working class angst. Luckenbill, doltishly nerdy as the young Eddie, at least grows into something resembling natural manhood. Lawrence is a charmingly tough Linda, with all the Liverpudlian glottal stops of the young George Harrison. Quinby sings Mrs. Lyons' part with distinguished clarity, but plays her paranoid forebodings as if she thought she was King Lear on the heath.
All that blood-red lighting notwithstanding, this is a pretty handsome production, its lives bound within Walmsley's oppressive brick flats and industrial skyline. It even has its clever moments in Kenwright and Tomson's staging. But by the time the entire cast gathers over the dead bodies at the end to sing the umpteenth reprise of the opening song you may wish you'd left the first time, almost three hours before.
Theater Review "Blood Brothers' * PLAYWRIGHT Willy Russell * DIRECTORS Bill Kenwright, Bob Tomson * CAST Petula Clark, Mark McGrath, David Cassidy, Tif Luckenbill, Priscilla Quinby, Yvette Lawrence * THEATER Golden Gate, through March 12 (415-776-1999)
