Angela Lansbury on Mack & Mabel

This interview appeared on New York City Center's website in October 2014.

MATT WEINSTOCK: I know that you’re great friends with Jerry Herman. With Mack & Mabel, was he consciously trying to write something darker and deeper than the shows he’d become famous for?
ANGELA LANSBURY: Possibly. Maybe he wanted to bring a more human quality to his work. I think he succeeded with Mack and Mabel—these two extraordinary, sort of mismatched people who come together through the motion picture business. The combination of those two opposites made the show interesting—and also a difficult one to sell, in some respects. Jerry tempered it with the cop stuff—policemen flying around stage, and so on. He realized the importance of stressing the knock-down drag-out stuff that they did in the movies of the time. It’s a small musical, but nevertheless, it deserves another look.

Why?
I think it’s one of the best scores that Jerry Herman wrote—along with a couple that I’m well acquainted with, as you probably know. The show’s human qualities are quite lovely, and its melodies are so superb. You know, “Times Heals Everything,” “I Won’t Send Roses,” all the lovely songs that we know. I think that these should be rediscovered by a new audience.

One interesting thing about “Time Heals Everything” is that it arises from a similar dramatic impulse as Sondheim’s “Losing My Mind,” from Follies: the debilitating love that doesn’t diminish with time.
Yes. So often those two great composers are compared—not compared, but simply brought up in the same sentence. And it’s interesting that in that particular phase of their composing lives, they did both produce songs that kind of hit the core of what love was like between a man and a woman—or at least what it was like during the period that they were writing about.

The original production of Mack & Mabel opened and closed in the fall of 1974, while you were starring in Gypsy. Did you get to see it?
Oh, yes. I squeezed it in, somehow. It must have been my night off. [Director Gower Champion] really was a first-class stager. You don’t see that kind of personalized choreography anymore. The cops number was quite outstanding and funny, and “Tap Your Troubles Away” was this enormous tap number, done in the good old-fashioned sloppy tap style. In the thirties, you did the time-step, then the double time-step, then the triple time-step, and so on. So that’s how Gower did it.

Why do you think the musical was so indifferently received? It played just 66 performances.
It certainly didn’t have much of a break, did it? Broadway can be very upsetting at times—as I certainly discovered with Anyone Can Whistle and Dear World. But Mack & Mabel mixed comedy with a very deep love story, and I think audiences didn’t quite know where to put their allegiance and attention. Is it the comedy? Is it the love story? They may have just given up.

I wonder if it would play better now. We’re more accustomed to complex, tragic musicals.
I’m not sure about that. I think the audiences of 1974 were aware of the historical aspects of the story, and of the characters. I don’t know that today’s audiences would be, particularly. But I don’t think you sell it on the basis of the backstory. You can sell it on the basis of these two great opposites—the fact that, given what an outrageous person Sennett was, and Normand being the kind of woman that she was, they ended up as lovers.

The two roles—Mack with his heartless bluster, and babyish, defiant Mabel—seem so specifically tailored to Robert Preston and Bernadette Peters that I wonder if they would disintegrate with other performers.
You’d have trouble bettering Bernadette, quite frankly. You really would. I think there are young women around today who live on that level—who have the capability of madness but who also have, deep down underneath, a strain of sincerity and reality. (pause) I can’t think of who they are. (laughs) They’re few and far between. And he was such an interesting actor. I worked with him in a movie [1960’s The Dark at the Top of the Stairs], and they don’t make them like that anymore. I don’t know who you’d cast in the male role. Can you think of anyone?

No! Because Robert Preston had such reservoirs of charisma that he could be winning even as a deeply unlikable character like Mack. I think that if George Clooney could sing, he might be able to bring it off.
Yes, I think that’s a good choice. Except to go from the movies, it’d be a bit of a come-down, wouldn’t it?

Jerry Herman has continually tinkered with Mack & Mabel since it closed on Broadway. He once called it his favorite show, explaining, “I guess you kind of love the one that didn’t make it.”
He doesn’t give up on things. He didn’t give up on Dear World, either; he kept tinkering with that. I think his ability to write those kinds of songs is pretty hard to beat.

What do you mean by “those kinds of songs”?
There are moments in musical theater when time stops momentarily by way of a song, and the singer makes you feel the absolute essence of how that character is reacting to being turned down, thrown out, whatever. Nobody does it better in the musical theater than Jerry Herman. Stephen does it too, of course. As you said, he certainly did it with that one great song, “Losing My Mind.” I remember the first time I heard that song, it absolutely blew me away. Still does, when I hear it. 

On Monday, you’ll receive the 2014 Rolex Dance Award at the Career Transition for Dancers Gala—and you also serve as the organization’s Honorary Chairwoman. How did you become involved?
Having been a musical actress, I know—not from my own experience, but from the experience of dancers and singers that I’ve worked with—how difficult it is for those people to continue those careers. Sometimes they simply can’t do it, and they have to move into a different moneymaking proposition. They don’t really know where to begin. To have somebody who’s going to listen and talk with you about what you could possibly start to do—well, that’s what the organization provides, and it’s terrific. Anyway, every year we have this huge affair. I’m sometimes trotted out as a special guest, which is lovely, but in this instance I’m sort of the queen bee. They’re going to give me a watch. It’s very thrilling to get a Rolex watch, I must say. (laughs) My children all have Rolex watches, but I don’t.

In Michael Feinstein's PBS series, there's a wonderful moment in which you watch footage of yourself in Gypsy, doing “Together, Wherever We Go.” You dismiss your pie-plate dance break as “absolute fakery from beginning to end.”
(laughs) It’s kind of true, you know. I got away with murder in the dance department. Always. I wasn’t too bad; as I said, I was a good faker. A lot of leading ladies are fakers—because they’re not dancers in the first place. They tend to be actress-singers, and what they manage to do—if they can really bring it off, it gets huge applause. “Thoroughly Modern Millie” [at the 1968 Academy Awards] is an example of my best sort of dance fakery.

You’ll also be dancing in the upcoming national tour of Blithe Spirit.
That’s very true—a little bit in that. I love dancing; I’ve always loved dancing. In Blithe Spirit it’s different every performance. I hope you know that. Oh, certain moves, I think, became second nature to me, and I use them in it, but always a little bit different. It was never choreographed by anybody except what I felt at that moment. And that’s the way it will always be for me.