The Things He Could Do, If He Were a Rich Man

Rothschild and Sons at the York Theatre Company

(L-R: Curtis Wiley, Jamie LaVerdiere, Christopher M. Williams, Glory Crampton, Robert Cuccioli, Nicholas Mongiardo-Cooper, and David Bryant Johnson in Rothschild and Sons.)

            An entirely pleasant surprise and a sure addition to the musical theater canon, the revised version of Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s 1970 musical The Rothschilds, entitled Rothschild and Sons, is playing at the Theater at Saint Peter’s, in a York Theatre Company prediction, through November 8^th.  It’s not a perfect show now, as it wasn’t then, but the score is wonderful—the songs, written, uniquely for Bock, in vivid period style, are at least as good individually as anything Bock and Harnick ever wrote—and the book, by Sherman Yellen, is absolutely phenomenal.

            “Scaled-down” has been the word of the day in describing this production, and that’s certainly accurate.  The simple set, designed by James Morgan, effectively recalls the contrasting opulence and poverty of the time of its setting while still remaining intimate.  Where the original production utilized a cast of thirty, this one sticks to eleven—nine of them playing multiple roles.  Unnecessary storylines as diverse as a love story with a British aristocrat and a conflict with Napoleon’s Minister of Police have been wisely cut, and the focus is pared down to a smaller story, still spanning most of the eighteenth century but dealing now primarily with the relationship between banking family patriarch Mayer Rothschild (Robert Cuccioli) and his five sons.  Rothschild is a Jewish dealer of rare coins who lives in the Frankfurt ghetto, a beautifully multifaceted character who depends on but ignores his wife, Gutele (Glory Crampton, stoically excellent), dotes on but seems blind to the needs of his sons, and craves power and wealth seemingly above all other things.  

Cuccioli is a leonine presence on the stage, as the character demands (Rothschild’s previous stage incarnation was Hal Linden).  He is sympathetic, larger-than-life without being overbearing, and refreshingly understated for a part that could easily be overdone.  He originated the title dual roles in Frank Wildhorn’s Jekyll and Hyde in 1997, and his ability in that show to sing plot-bearing lyrics (by a long shot Wildhorn’s best) translates to this one.  Harnick’s lyrics can be tricky, but Cuccioli handles them with ease, and he is equally believable playing 29 and 68.

The ensemble is less immediately impressive but very capable.  David Bryant Johnston and Jamie LaVerdiere as two of the Rothschild sons are game supporting players, and Mark Pinter, as a series of self-involved European princes who stand in Mayer’s way, is a teeth-gnashing delight.  But the individual achievements of the cast are not as important as the simple fact that this show is playable, seeming very much a staple of regional theater even as it isn’t.  This version of the show stands a much greater chance, it’s clear, of lasting.

The themes here are very similar to those in some of Bock and Harnick’s other work—Fiddler on the Roof is the most obvious connection; both shows deal with demanding, towering Jewish fathers with five children of the same gender who long for wealth and come to resent the decisions of their respective broods—and show connections to Yellen as a playwright, too; he goes in for biography (he’s written plays and musicals about Henry VIII, Josephine Baker, and Sinclair Lewis).  It fits, in short, into a distinct history of the careers of all three of these men, despite the fact that it often seems to be glazed over in the history of Broadway.  It was nominated for nine Tonys and won two, and ran 505 performances, but has never been revived on Broadway.  Watching a show written so long ago that all of a sudden seems more significant than we’d been lead to believe it was isn’t a look back at all.  It’s a beginning.