33 Years Later, ‘Apple Tree’  Still Stands Up

By Julie Stern

EAST HADDAM — The idea for The Apple Tree was conceived in the early 1960s by theatrical producer Stuart Ostrow, who felt too many then-current Broadway musicals suffered from a lack of sufficient material to carry them through two acts. While they started out well enough, they ran out of steam at intermission.

Putting together a team that started with Fiddler on the Roof creators Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, as well as Jerome Robbins and Mike Nichols, Mr Ostrow spent years searching for the perfect combination of short pieces that could inspire a musical consisting of three “one-acts.”

Sifting through possibilities that ranged from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Truman Capote, they eventually came up with three very disparate works: Mark Twain’s The Diary of Adam and Eve, Frank R. Stockton’s children’s story The Lady of the Tiger, and Jules Feiffer’s comic-strip fairy tale Passionella.

The resulting work was The Apple Tree, which opened in New York in 1966, and ran for 463 performances. The original starred a very young Alan Alda, along with Barbara Harris and Larry Blyden, playing the lead roles in all three segments. Its effectiveness has always depended on the ability of the stars to switch gears and give each character its distinctive looniness.

Happily, the current revival of the show at the Goodspeed Opera House has found in Joanna Glushak, John Scherer and Kevin Ligon, a trio who can carry it off with joyous abandon.

Diary is a character driven comedy sketch which presents John Scherer as Adam, a simple unimaginative fellow who, charged by God with naming the animals, immediately dubs them “swimmers,” “fliers,” “growlers” and “crawlers.” A cow is a “four-pronged milk bucket.”

Joanna Glushak’s Eve, in contrast, is more sensitive and intuitive, anxious to redecorate the place and full of tender sympathies toward other creatures (pitying the poor fish in the pond, she insists on putting a bunch of them in Adam’s bed to warm them up.) She’s a natural sucker for the serpent, played by Mr Ligon as a Damon Runyonesque tinhorn.

The Lady or The Tiger is more reminiscent of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat (which is a show many of the Goodspeed ensemble players list in their previous credits). Set in the savage splendor of some ancient kingdom, it focuses on the rather barbaric Princess Barbara’s dilemma: Should she save her lover from being eaten by the horrible tiger, when the alternative is to see him married to the beautiful lady waiting behind the other door?

After the intermission, the scene switches to a Feifferesque New York in which poor benighted Ella, a hideously be-sooted and bedraggled chimneysweep, has her innermost dream granted by a fairy godmother (the narrator Ligon), and is turned into a Hollywood star overnight. But is she happy? Not when she falls in love with the Presley-Jagger-Dylanesque leather-clad bad boy who tells her that she lacks “real” human character — dirty fingernails, bitter experience… So, well, you get the picture.

Despite their success with Fiddler, and other musicals such as Fiorello and She Loves Me, Bock and Harnicks songs are the least memorable thing about this show. What holds up is the quality of the material.

On the other hand, the staging is simple but charming, the costumes are inventive, the chorus is excellent, and the comedy is delightfully droll.

Tied together by the talents of the three principals — and by a coyly flashed apple — The Apple Tree definitely works, and 33 years after its inception, it is as timely as ever. Furthermore, this is a great show to take kids to; they’ll enjoy the jokes and the pacing is easy to take.

(Performances of The Apple Tree continue at Goodspeed Opera House through December 19. Call the theatre’s box office, 860/873-8664, for performance and ticket details.)