A Continuation of Learning

The production is the annual charity event produced by landscape designer Madison Cox, whose own way with a garden is world-renowned. I’m sure his late husband, Pierre Bergé, has even spread the word further afield where Pierre and his earlier partner, Yves Saint Laurent, now float about neither above nor below but rooted differently in this same realm so we don’t realise they, no longer garden-variety humans, are still hovering about, especially here in their beloved Morocco where the air itself feels spiced, a melange of jinns and cumin-coloured sunsets, a frolic of fragrances, saffron, cinnamon, sin, salting the air even more as it wafts in from its journey over water from Gibraltar and collecting themselves within it in the casbah before moving on down into the medina in whirls of instinct and entreaties and transactions that pass themselves off as trust and desire and something deeper than knowledge so that there is no need to attempt to comprehend anything, say, scientific, even, God knows (thus man), how atoms can be spliced, a frisson of otherness always present around here instead of a fission that obliterates us all into the sameness of nothing, the nothingness of the same. At least, that’s the narrative I breezily tell myself when confronted with priests and the Bible, mullahs and the Koran, rabbis and the Torah, monks and the Tripitaka, all those earthly guardians of theological gardens, the keepers of the gates.

But I’ve run on ahead of myself. Back to lives lived worthily.

Madison is the President of the Fondation Jardin Majorelle in Marrakesh as well as President of the Fondation Pierre Bergé/Yves Saint Laurent which oversees the Musée Yves Saint Laurent in Paris. He also has a home in Tangier and the evening benefits the city’s American Legation and two important local organisations, an orphanage and HIV/AIDS clinic.

The night of the performance I was seated in the audience next to Mia and four-year-old Bluesy, the big sister to two-year-old László who Darren and Mia thought wasn’t quite ready to witness his daddy do what his daddy does from the vantage point of an audience member in addition to being a family one. Bluesy had already seen him, however, in his Tony-winning role as the retired obsolete helperbot, Oliver, in Maybe Happy Ending. Bluesy, Mia, and I were sitting ensconced in the middle of a bench in front of the wall in the back of the chairs that made up the “stalls.” The wall supported the promontory that became the “dress circle” for the evening. Our perch there was at the starting point for the centre aisle through which many entrances were staged by the evening’s director, Rob Ashford, who, with his husband Kevin Ryan, has a home here, Villa Léon l’Africain, which once belonged to antiques dealer Christopher Gibbs who then sold it to Bergé before Ashford and Ryan purchased it. When Darren made his first entrance through that centre aisle, he added a peck on Bluesy’s cheek as he glided by in his sailor costume ready to cut a rug and regale us with songs. “That’s my daddy,” she whispered to me, her lovely little face registering such … well, okay, there’s only one word for it ... glee.

I fell completely for Bluesy in that moment. I can also vouch that she inherited her daddy’s innate sense of rhythm because her little right foot next to me as she sat on her mama’s lap kept time with all the singing and music as she gently poked my leg with it. It were as if she also knew innately to turn what could have been an annoyance into the loveliest tap-tap-tap that kept time with all the tap-tap-tap dancing going on there before us. In intermittent moments when she stopped, I missed those little jabs of joy I was getting from her. She somehow knew I missed them - more inherited innateness there in the knowing innocence that actors keep, yep, on tap in order to play in the way they creatively do - so she’d begin her tap-tap-tapping again against my leg and look over at me and give me a smile infused with that infectious innocence she was just beginning to know how to wield without quite yet slipping into slyness because it still had its sense of wonder intact.

As Bluesy was tapping out her Morse Code of my-daddy-my-daddy-my-daddy there on my leg, I was not only getting that message but also the one reminding me that Criss had made his Broadway debut as Daniel Radcliffe’s replacement as J. Pierrepont Finch in the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, a role that Robert Morse originated. Ashford had even directed and choreographed that revival with his trademark panache. The man sure knows how to shake a tail feather and shower an audience with showmanship. Criss went into How to Succeed back in 2012 with only two weeks rehearsal and Rob somehow whipped him and the rest of his cast for Dames into showtime-shape in a matter of five or six days. The male chorus members in the ensemble were in another kind of showtime shape as the number below attests. The stage was erected over Veere’s pool and Rob utilised that for this stripped-down number below.

Dames is a loving parody of a Busby Berkeley musical about how theatre can prove to be a kind of saving grace and resilience can be a kind of redemption all its own when a tincture of talent is added to it. Ashford even took the parody a meta step further and reimagined “Singapore Sue,” the show’s production number inside a production number, as “Tangerine Tess.” The plot revolves around a sailor/songwriter named Dick and Ruby, the little gal with a lot of gumption he falls for from Utah who arrives in New York “with nothing but tap shoes in her suitcase and a prayer in her heart.” Criss comes equipped with Gene Kelly’s disciplined jauntiness in his performing genes and it was on full dashing display that night in his performance as Dick. Ted Lasso’s Phil Dunst played his sidekick, Lucky, like a bulgier Ray Bolger. I also loved Summer Strallen as Joan , the blonde Blondell-like character. and Paula Leggett Chase as Mona Kent, the deadpan diva to whom she gave a kicky Kay Thompson flair.

Criss’s leading lady was Julianne Hough who played Ruby, a role which made Bernadette Peters a star off-Broadway back in the 1960s. Peters got branded with her singular perky Kewpie doll allure in that role and heralded her own arrival on the scene with the adenoidal way she could deliver her high notes with a catch in her throat that then caught audiences off-guard in a very good way. Hough though - who, like Ruby, is actually from Utah - is all sinew, her voice a bit reedier; she reads more as a ballerina toeing the leading-lady line. But she also has her own singular appeal, a likability that longs to be more than liked and it is in that longing where we begin to fall for her in the way audiences discover they love a performer and sometimes a performance. She’s Liza with less vibrato and better legs - or maybe Ann-Margret, who played the role in a 1971 television production of Dames, mimicking Gwen Verdon. But that’s all too droll, too glib - and it’s Hough’s utter lack of glibness that is finally her charm as a performer. More than any other person on the makeshift stage that night she possessed that knowing innocence with which Bluesy was already genetically blessed. I adored her.

It is the knowingness and innocence at the heart of the musical itself that makes it so appealing, each of which Ashford and his cast and creative team found within themselves to conjure such a lovely evening. Kudos to musical director David Chase. musicians Tom Hutch and Paul Mutzabaugh, stage manager Ruby Isaacs, costume and set and graphics designer Jamal Odedra, lighting designer Fabiana Piccioli, associate director Kate Tydman, and associate choreographer Michaeljon Slinger. Kevin Ryan, who oversees Madison Cox’s office and served as associate producer, was instrumental in making everything run smoothly.