Theater Review—

‘All About Us’ Was A Good Choice To Open Playhouse Season

By Julie Stern

WESTPORT — John Kander and Fred Ebb are well known for collaborating over four decades on some of the most wonderful musicals of all time, including Chicago, Kiss of the Spider Woman and above all, Cabaret.

Before Mr Ebb’s untimely death, they were in the midst of a project that had intrigued them for quite a few years: making a musical version of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, The Skin of Our Teeth. While it was not quite finished, at least to their perfectionist standards, All About Us was close enough to completion to merit a production as this year’s season opener at Westport Country Playhouse.

Written in 1942, in the darkest days of the Second World War, the original Wilder play was both an apocalyptic warning of mankind’s ability to destroy itself as well as a celebration of the resiliency of the human spirit and the creative power of the theater itself.

Like his earlier prize winner, Our Town, this drama plays with the idea of the characters as actors on a stage. There is a stage manager trying to keep things focused, while the actors periodically explode into fits of pique and professional resentment, threatening to call Equity to complain.

Where Our Town found universals within the simple confines of Grovers’ Corners, N.H., The Skin of Our Teeth is allegorical or schematic (or something) following the fortunes of the Antrobus family over a five or ten thousand year period, beginning with the most recent Ice Age (which led to the extinction of their pet woolly mammoths) and extending through recorded history, until a cataclysmic war threatens to wipe out the entire world.

George Bernard Shaw once said something to the effect that The reasonable man adapts himself to fit the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to fit himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Antrobus is the hero of the play, an inventor with an irrepressible urge to use his knowledge to make the world better for humans. He invented the wheel, the alphabet, the toothpick, and a host of other useful creations. At the outset, George and his wife Maggie, along with their children Henry and Gladys, and the dumb blonde maid Sabina Fairweather, are struggling to keep the fire going that will keep them from freezing in the coming ice age.

Later, as the elected President of the Fraternal Order of Mammals, George will have to save as many of them as he can from the coming rain, as predicted by the Atlantic City fortune teller, Esmeralda. This will entail getting them all on a big wooden ark…

Finally the action moves to the modern era, when the world is being torn apart by an Armageddon-like war. The story has all kinds of biblical and historical overtones. Maggie vaguely remembers how they once lived in a lovely garden apartment complex, before they were kicked out.

Henry, an evil, angry, bad seed of a kid who has a tendency to throw rocks at people, used to be called Cain before his parents changed his name. When an entire company of soldiers is killed in the third act, Henry struts among the corpses in a leather coat, looking pleased.

With the city destroyed, George’s library burned, and hope all but lost, Maggie and George must decide what to do in order to survive.

Now put all this to music, 25 musical numbers in all (with no intermission) and you have a show that is fairly riveting. All the principals have terrific voices: Shuler Hensley as George, Yvette Freeman as Maggie, Cady Huffman as Sabina, and Carlo Alban as Henry.

On top of that, the production showcases the eternally wonderful Eartha Kitt as the mysterious and seductive Esmeralda, breaking up the Mammal ceremonies with her dire weather prediction.

The minor characters are also outstanding. David Standish has a beautiful voice as the telegram boy. Eric Michael Gillett and Drew Taylor are delightfully cuddly as a pair of mammoths, desperate to get warm. And over the course of the show we get to meet such luminaries as Socrates, Plato, Homer, Moses, Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, and Joan of Arc.

Dazzling musical numbers, imaginative staging, and droll comic bits all make for an interesting and entertaining theatrical experience that is different from most of what you will get to see in local theaters, or for that matter, on Broadway.