Some like it hot, and some like it odd. Put Broadway star Emily Skinner in the latter category, at least for the next few weeks. Skinner is starring in Do I Hear a Waltz?, the opening show in 42nd Street Moon's new season of infrequently revived musicals. "What's interesting to me is the script," Skinner said in a recent phone interview. "It's really odd, and it's odd with this music, and the music is odd with these lyrics."
Three of the most celebrated names in Broadway musical history collaborated for the first and only time on Do I Hear a Waltz?, and a miserable time was had by all. Both librettist Arthur Laurents and lyricist Stephen Sondheim have written frankly about their difficulties in working with a defensive, dictatorial Richard Rodgers, who equipped theaters with hidden bottles of vodka and feared he'd be called out on diminishing talents as a composer. Little wonder that the results were "odd."
"The story has a kind of edge to it," Skinner said. "The music is classic Richard Rodgers, but Sondheim's lyrics can be very dark and very dry, and at the end of the story it takes a sharp and ugly turn in what turns out to be a sort of aborted love affair. It's tonally a kind of weird match, but I like that it's not just a winsome musical theater take on romance."
Skinner plays Leona Samish, an unmarried American on vacation in Venice, who finds her frozen romantic urges thawing under the glow of a handsome and debonair Italian merchant. In the original Broadway production of The Time of the Cuckoo, Laurents' own play on which he based the musical's libretto, Shirley Booth played Leona Samish and, unlike Skinner, was afraid to go to some of the material's darker places. "Arthur Laurents says she sort of niced-up the material because she was terrified the audience wouldn't like her."
Nor was Laurents pleased with Hollywood's adaptation, retitled Summertime, that became a vehicle for Katharine Hepburn. "Arthur Laurents didn't get to write the screenplay, and he was very upset with how they completely changed the story. It became this story of a spinster who has never had love, and she goes to Italy and this is her last chance. That's not the story. Leona is a broad. She's a woman who's had life experiences and is a little bit tough, but she doesn't know how to open herself up to find a real connection with people."
Perhaps a play on words is inevitable here, but Skinner definitely found a connection with costar Alice Ripley in Side Show. In the 1997 musical, Skinner and Ripley played conjoined twins who find work in sideshows and vaudeville while trying to have individual romantic lives. Skinner and Ripley shared a single nomination for a best-actress Tony Award, so intertwined were their performances. The musical only ran a few months, but became a cult favorite, and a Broadway revival is due this season. "I don't think Side Show really got its due," Skinner said. "It's a piece that has something to say, and should be seen by a new generation."
Skinner has been back to Broadway several times since Side Show, most recently as the title character's dance instructor in Billy Elliot. She's often on the road, singing with symphony orchestras and headlining in big musicals at regional theaters. Skinner had expected to be back on Broadway last year in a revue built around the many successes of producer-director Harold Prince. But financing fell apart, and now Prince of Broadway, with Skinner still aboard, is set to debut in Osaka, Japan in 2015, with New York the intended final destination.
But that delay did mean Skinner was available when 42nd Street Moon's Artistic Director Greg MacKellan invited her to perform at its Frank Loesser tribute last year. "I was charmed by everybody when I came out here, and then Greg asked me if I'd be interested in doing Do I Hear a Waltz? I was, like, that's wild because I've always been interested in that show, but it's never done."
Director MacKellan and company are working with a revised script that author Laurents prepared for an earlier revival. "The original production had a big ensemble playing all the people of Venice, and they stripped all of that away," Skinner said. "Now it's just the core eight characters. It's more of a chamber piece, which is really what the story is."
Doing this production of Waltz is obviously not about padding bank accounts. "I had some other things offered to me this fall that certainly would have made me more money," Skinner said. "But I'm at the point in my life and career where I've done a lot of great things and I hope to do more great things, but I've had that experience. What I want is to do now things that are interesting and exciting to me, and this is interesting and exciting to me."
Do I Hear a Waltz? will run Oct. 1-19 at the Eureka Theatre. Tickets are $21-$75. Call 255-8207 or go to 42ndstmoon.org.