Old Tales in a New Kingdom

Last spring at New York’s Lyceum Theatre, an actor in a flying harness came swirling out from the wings, tumbling and flipping across the stage in a simulated act of drowning. As he undulated lifelessly just off the stage floor, three “mermaids” came to the rescue. They gathered up the man in their arms, carrying him aloft until they disappeared into the wings.

The stunning tableau was part of a flying workshop for “Hans Christian Andersen,” the new musical opening Sept. 7 at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater. The producers are hoping that the world premiere, starring John Glover in the title role, will eventually lead to a Broadway engagement.

There’s every reason to be sanguine. After all, the show is about Andersen, one of the most beloved writers in the world, whose fairy tales--”The Little Mermaid,” “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” “The Little Match Girl” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes”--have become classics. Moreover, the show features songs by Frank Loesser from “Hans Christian Andersen,” the 1952 film starring Danny Kaye that introduced such songs as “Thumbelina,” “The Ugly Duckling,” “Wonderful Copenhagen” and “No Two People.”

On top of that, the material has a proven pedigree. A British production, starring Tommy Steele, was a 1974 West End hit. But in the weeks preceding the first preview, scheduled for Thursday, almost everyone connected with the show was unusually anxious. For this “Hans Christian Andersen” was shaping up to be as far from expectations as possible, with no resemblance to the film apart from the songs and bearing the iconoclastic stamp of its two unlikely creators: director-choreographer Martha Clarke and Irish novelist and playwright Sebastian Barry. Clarke is a onetime modern dancer whose experimental productions of “The Garden of Earthly Delights” and “Vienna Lusthaus” earned plaudits for their grotesque and lyrical evocations of primal human passions. Barry’s acclaimed “Steward of Christendom,” presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, featured a grizzled old man in stained, crusted long underwear babbling in a mental ward.

There was no doubt that Foy Inventerprises, the aerial special-effects wizards, could and would make the actors fly. But could the maverick team of Clarke and Barry, unproven in the musical theater milieu, create liftoff for a show about a man fixed in the popular imagination as a purveyor of simple sentiment? Would the public respond to a take on the beloved storyteller as a tormented old man, facing death and searching for the meaning of his existence in a dreamscape that weaves events of his life with tales he created?

“It’s whacked, no question about it,” says Michael David, head of the Dodgers, the producing entity that tapped Clarke for the project and is providing enhancement money to the ACT for the showcase. “This is nothing like I’ve ever done, and it’s both exhilarating and terrifying. But it just seemed that these extraordinary tales and these wonderful songs needed a component to bring them to the stage. And it was pretty natural for us to go to people who could create a singular theatrical vocabulary for the material, one that could be artful and entertaining and at the same time push the envelope.”

*

In fact, both fairy tales and Loesser are familiar terrain for the Dodgers, as is the idea of unusual pairings. They were the ones, after all, who chose avant-garde opera director Richard Jones for their Tony-winning “Titanic,” which ultimately triumphed after a much-publicized troubled development period.

They also presented “Into the Woods,” Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s quirky journey into the world of the Brothers Grimm. While the show was initially considered a sophisticated take on fairy tales, it eventually drew a sizable family audience. David says that “Hans Christian Andersen” came out of discussions with Jo Loesser, the widow of Frank Loesser, after successful Dodger Broadway revivals of the composer’s “Guys and Dolls” and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.”

“Frank always thought that it was a natural for the stage, and I’ve been approached by every producer known to man because the songs are so well-known,” Loesser says. “But when I sat down with Michael, we didn’t want to just repeat the London show, we wanted to do something more adventurous.”

Loesser says she and David were both struck by the Andersen biography by Rumer Godden. It is the portrait of a tortured artist who would become the favored dinner guest of aristocrats and royals in 19th century Europe but who never overcame his brutal, lonely childhood. His father, a poor cobbler, died young; his mother was alcoholic. Bizarrely tall and stoop-shouldered, he was ridiculed mercilessly by children in his school--a trauma biographers suggest gave rise to “The Ugly Duckling.” Terrified of emotional intimacy, he formed obsessive platonic relationships with women, including the opera singer Jenny Lind. He also hated children. Late in his life, the town of Copenhagen commissioned a sculpture of its famous citizen surrounded by youngsters. He asked that they be removed.

“He used the world of imagination as his escape from unhappiness,” says Glover, who plays Andersen in the ACT production. “But I don’t think he ever completely exorcised his demons. There were always the ‘little rats of fear traveling the wainscoting in the corner of the eye,’ to quote Sebastian Barry. [Henrik] Ibsen wanted to meet him, but when he came for a visit, Andersen went up to his room and wouldn’t come down, he was so frightened. Another time, he went to visit Charles Dickens and stayed for five weeks, they couldn’t get rid of him. One day, Dickens found him in his front lawn, weeping uncontrollably because he felt he wasn’t appreciated. He wanted to be an actor, a dancer, a great novelist, a playwright. He thought the fairy tales were trifles. He was a neurotic mess, but he was able to transform those hardships of his life into wonderful stories.”

Indeed, while some of the tales--156 in all-- are sentimental, the majority are actually rather intense: a young orphan freezes to death in the snow, a witch is beheaded, a tin soldier and his beloved toy ballerina are consumed in a fire, the emperor is ridiculed in the nightmare of appearing naked in public.

*

At a very basic level, David says, Andersen’s work is primal and mythic. That’s what made him think of Clarke for the task of adapting the material. The producer had known her since the early ‘70s when she and Julie Taymor, another experimental director who made the jump to Broadway with “The Lion King,” were involved with Lyn Austin’s downtown musical lab.

David says he’d been looking for a project for Clarke since her 1985 impressionistic production of “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” He admired the wordless dramatization of the Hieronymous Bosch painting filled with sensual imagery that featured a group of seven dancers, including Clarke, tumbling across the stage in cartwheels and borne aloft in seraphic patterns. “It suggested she could make the same kind of magic and mystery to bring ‘Hans Christian Andersen’ alive for us.”

“Martha’s work isn’t intellectual,” says Carey Perloff, artistic director of ACT who has worked with the Dodgers on two other projects, “High Society” and “Wrong Mountain,” both of which went on to Broadway, though without happy results. “There is always a kind of transformation in Andersen’s work and that’s what her work is all about: physically, emotionally and musically. The fairy tale is the perfect springboard for her aesthetic.”

David dispels the idea that Taymor’s success with the “The Lion King” had anything to do with the risky choice of Clarke. “Our courage was underwritten by the fact that part of what we were doing involved a score that people loved and knew,” he says. “An awful lot of people knew ‘Where I Wander,’ ‘The Ugly Duckling’ and so on, and that empowered us to think how wild we could be, that we had that as some kind of an anchor.”

While Clarke has created evocative stage pictures, most recently for “Vers La Flamme,” at Lincoln Center, in which she told seven Chekhov stories, she has never before been called upon to seamlessly meld book, music and lyrics into a coherent whole. And she is appropriately “terrified and ecstatic” about the challenge.

*

Reached by phone in San Francisco just before the first full run-through of the production on the ACT stage, she good-naturedly joked that she had no idea what it is that she and her collaborators have concocted.

“If I had to flatten it into one sentence, I don’t know that I could,” she says with laugh. “It is a man looking back on his life, rather like flipping a photo book rapidly in your hand. Like they say in that moment before death, your whole life flashes in front of you. It’s kind of dark and lyrical and evanescent. It’s not linear. But if I had tried to explain it, verbally, I’m afraid people wouldn’t come to see it.”

Presenting Chekhov stories in “Vers La Flamme” without using words--”it’s like trying to sweep through the air”--helped prepare her for the storytelling that is central to the musical. Between flashes of events from Andersen’s life, the show intersperses re-creations of such tales as “The Ugly Duckling,” “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” “The Little Mermaid,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and others.

She added that Barry, whom she brought into the project after seeing his “Steward of Christendom,” has been an invaluable collaborator, even though this will mark his musical theater debut as well. The 45-year-old reclusive Irish writer--whose most recent play in New York was “Our Lady of Sligo,” about an alcoholic woman on her deathbed looking back over her life--had never even seen a Broadway musical before receiving the assignment. But Clarke felt, as did David and Loesser, that Barry had the sensitivity to find his way into Andersen’s heart.

“We both love imagery,” she said. “His is words, mine is movement, so that match feels very, very comfortable.” Clarke also noted that the spare poetry and austerity of Barry’s libretto helps to balance the simplicity and innocence of Loesser’s music, though she admitted, with a sigh, that weaving a virtually new book together with a score already in existence has been a daunting task. (The music from the film has been augmented with interpolations of other Loesser songs, though none are well-known.) As orchestrator and arranger of the music, she has enlisted the help of her longtime collaborator Richard Peaslee, who has written the incidental music for many of her works.

“The sentimentality police are always around. But it’s not too difficult with Andersen because his material is so rich,” says Clarke, drawing parallels between him and Franz Kafka and Lewis Carroll, whose writings inspired two of her previous pieces, “The Hunger Artist,” based on a Kafka biography, and “Alice’s Adventures Underground,” which she did for London’s Royal National Theatre. On the other hand, she adds, “if I have an ironical or cynical side, it’s pretty much off-camera. You can’t really separate your life from what you’re creating, and my life is less chaotic now, so this is much more lyrical. My life is calmer, my son is grown up and I have two charming little dogs. It’s the work that’s more chaotic.”

Clarke says that while the pressures of creating a Broadway-type musical are new, she doesn’t feel compromised. In fact, she says, she welcomed the notes and input she received from David, Glover and the rest of a creative team that includes some seasoned theater veterans, such as designers Jane Greenwood, Paul Gallo and Robert Israel. “I feel that I don’t have to throw out who I am. I’m not suddenly going to have a lot of girls in spangles out there,” she says. “I’m working in the way I work even though I know that this isn’t a tax write-off for anybody.”

*

David says that the fact that there are no immediate plans beyond San Francisco has helped to liberate the artists working on “Hans Christian Andersen.”

“We’ll just see what we have,” he says. “Of course, you want to share what you have with as many people as possible, and Broadway is the address that allows you to do that. But there is no theater [in New York] booked and waiting. It’s not like we have to get it right or we’re in big trouble.”

Glover says that the absence of that commercial pressure has made “Hans Christian Andersen” the most unusual project he’s ever been involved in. “I mean, look at me, I can’t sing and I’m playing the lead,” he says. “It’s been an incredibly collaborative process. You’re never quite sure what’s going to happen at rehearsals. Martha doesn’t always know how to get what she’s after, but she somehow finds it.”

Glover adds that the unique process of creating “Hans Christian Andersen” is not unlike an obscure Andersen fairy tale titled “A Question of Imagination,” about a young man who wants to be a writer but feels that he was born a century too late. Everything good has already been written about. “So he goes to find an old wise woman--the village gatekeeper--who teaches him the answer,” says the actor.

There’s a parallel to Andersen’s own life. When his father was dying, his mother sent him to a witch to find out what she could do to keep him alive. And, adds Glover, what Andersen discovered in his own life is echoed in what the old lady at the gate says in the fairy tale he would later write: “You have to learn to look and listen. It’s a question of imagination.” *