Mack & Mabel

DANCING BEAK TO CHEEK Davis plants one on Steinhagen.

Mack & Mabel has been in constant flux since its 1974 debut, where it lasted only eight weeks on Broadway despite the star power of Robert Preston and Bernadette Peters. It enjoyed greater success in London revivals with major revisions to Stewart’s problematic book, but despite the creators’ tinkering the show retains an essential imbalance that makes it tough to digest. It may be, simply, that this story shouldn’t be a musical—or at least not one written by Herman. The love story, such as it is, between silent-film mogul Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand, the Brooklyn girl he turned into a star, isn’t a happy one. Sweet and spunky Mabel, rebuffed time and again by the gruff, unsympathetic Sennett, gets caught up in a tabloid scandal, succumbs to cocaine and heroin, and dies young. Hello, Dolly! it ain’t.

And there’s the rub: Herman doesn’t do dark. Celebratory songs like “When Mabel Comes in the Room” sound like leftovers from Dolly or Mame. Enormous song-and-dance production numbers introducing Sennett’s Bathing Beauties and Keystone Kops might play okay on a Broadway stage with a cast of 50, but when it’s 15 actors stepping on one another in Circle’s intimate space, they just feel like inappropriate and interminable interruptions when we’d rather get back to the title characters. Bellie, as usual, does an impressive job of cramming a big show into a small space, but this one probably wasn’t worth the effort. It may be one of Herman’s loveliest scores, but it’s attached to the wrong story.—Kris Vire