Toward a More Dapper Flapper

LA JOLLA —  Standing around a piano, singers harmonize on the bouncy title song from the 1967 movie musical “Thoroughly Modern Millie.”

As the song reaches its peak, the lyric “I’m changing and how” ricochets down the hallway outside of the rehearsal rooms where a new stage version of the musical is being readied. In this bustling warren of activity, the words sound like a motto not just for the story’s 1920s-era heroine, who wants to reinvent herself as a modern woman, but for the radically reworked show itself.

Only four songs remain from the movie, and much of the story has been rewritten, especially parts that perpetuated racial stereotypes.

Other changes--altogether unplanned--began to occur as the show approached its originally scheduled opening today at the La Jolla Playhouse. On Sept. 22, lead actress Erin Dilly was replaced by her understudy, Sutton Foster, as preview performances loomed just a week and a half away. Shortly thereafter, the first preview performance, scheduled for Oct. 3, was canceled to allow more time for the show’s complex technical elements to jell. But technical issues continued to plague the production, which resulted in the cancellation of weekend previews after an Oct. 6 preview was performed largely as a concert reading. The musical now is set to open on Oct. 22.

“I think that anyone who spends his or her time trying to make a new musical has to be a little crazy,” says Michael Mayer, the show’s director. “But as the saying goes: It’s crazy, but it just might work.”

Many people are watching to see whether it does, indeed, work. New musicals are so costly nowadays that relatively few make it this far. “Millie,” however, has producers--including Whoopi Goldberg and Fox Theatricals, a Chicago-based enterprise that has backed such shows as “Jekyll & Hyde” and “Death of a Salesman”--waiting in the wings to take it to Broadway. Though no New York opening date has been set, a successful launch in La Jolla would go a long way toward making that happen.

Meanwhile, La Jolla Playhouse has thrown its name and considerable developmental resources behind the show, as well as staking nearly $1 million of the world premiere’s budgeted $1.6-million cost. (The potential Broadway producers provided the rest.)

Whereas the movie could bank on the star power of Julie Andrews, Mary Tyler Moore and Carol Channing, the stage version is populated with people who, for the most part, are still working their way toward stardom.

Mayer, a hot commodity since his recent New York stagings of “Side Man” and “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” is collaborating with composer Jeanine Tesori, who wrote music for the small musical “Violet,” as well as “The First Picture Show,” seen at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum last summer.

The third key member of the creative team is co-author and lyricist Dick Scanlan, who got the project rolling in 1993. Before writing this, his first theater piece, Scanlan was an actor best known for portraying Miss Great Plains in the off-Broadway drag romp “Pageant.”

Mayer and Scanlan are 40, and Tesori is 38, so all were mere youngsters when the movie came out. A quirky musical comedy, it focused on a young woman (Andrews) who moves to New York City determined to live a modern, liberated life while all around her other single young women are being spirited from their boarding-house rooms and sold into white slavery.

In La Jolla, Pat Carroll, a veteran of television (“Caesar’s Hour”), stage (“Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein”) and film (Disney’s “The Little Mermaid”), plays the comically malevolent boarding-house operator and white slaver Mrs. Meers.

Foster, who assumed the title role from Dilly, played Eponine in the tour of “Les Miserables” that recently passed through Los Angeles and San Diego, and Sarah Uriarte Berry, who portrays Millie’s friend Miss Dorothy, played Julie Jordan in the national tour of “Carousel” and the title character in Tesori’s “Violet” at Laguna Playhouse last year.

The departure of Dilly, who was seen in Los Angeles earlier this year as the female lead in “Martin Guerre,” came about after “a very long conversation that was mutually respectful and loving,” Mayer says. “I love Erin; I think she’s great, [but] this just wasn’t going to happen this time around. I hope I’ll work with her someday.

“I can’t get more specific than that,” he adds, explaining that a private conversation, under such circumstances, should remain that way. Dilly’s agent did not respond to requests for comment.

An earlier workshop in New York last year featured Kristin Chenoweth in the title role and Bea Arthur as Mrs. Meers. But Chenoweth later bowed out to star in a television sitcom.

As Dilly’s understudy, Foster already knew the lines, songs and choreography. Though the departure “came out of nowhere” and left Foster “shocked and surprised and terrified,” she says, “I’m just trying to keep perspective on everything and do my job.”

While coping with this turn of events, the creative team additionally realized that technical elements of the show weren’t coming together as quickly as planned.

“Everyone wants to believe that these things are possible,” Mayer explains, but “reality hit, and we couldn’t live with the fiction anymore.”

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Interest in translating “Thoroughly Modern Millie” to the stage has waxed and waned though the years. “A lot of people have sniffed around that project, from what I’ve heard,” says Cameron Mackintosh, the English producer behind such hits as “Les Miserables” and “The Phantom of the Opera.”

He pondered a staging in the 1980s, thinking that the movie “had some terrific music in it, and overall, it had a fun, silly plot.” His inquiries never came to fruition, however, and he admits that he could never “work out how to make it better than or different from the film.”

Therein lies “Millie’s” biggest challenge.

Although it became one of the more popular screen musicals of the ‘60s, its offbeat sense of humor and improbable plot complications left many viewers baffled.

Fun little touches included a laundry cart used to transport the chloroformed women, which announced itself with a telltale squeaky wheel, and the boarding-house elevator that wouldn’t budge until its occupants broke into a tap dance.

Problems included the ugly Fu Manchu stereotypes of its Chinese villains; the jarring juxtaposition of bright comedy and impending menace; and the scenic non sequiturs, such as Andrews’ gig as a singer at a Jewish wedding.

Scanlan himself had conflicting reactions when a tape of “Millie” became his chief source of entertainment at a beach house he rented in 1988.

“Inside of its very messy and, ultimately, leaden finished product,” he says, “I heard a wonderful voice--in the dialogue, in the relationship to language.”

The story touched him too. “This is a story about individuals who, in their heart and in their soul, feel that they need to make a change,” he says, tapping a hand to his chest, “to become the person that they’ve always felt they were inside. . . . To make your life what you want it to be is fundamentally American. And musical theater is a fundamentally American form of expression. So it seemed the perfect merger of theme with form.”

Hooked on the idea of bringing “Millie” to the stage, he struck a partnership with original screenwriter Richard Morris, who held the stage rights, in the fall of 1993. They collaborated on a script for about 2 1/2 years, until Morris’ death in April 1996.

Mayer joined the project in 1996, followed by Tesori in 1998.

They wrote around what they perceived to be the movie’s problems, while pumping their revised story full of lively new songs and all-around high spirits.

Perhaps the most significant change in the stage version is its depiction of the Chinese characters. In the movie, Mrs. Meers, the boarding-house operator, makes a little money on the side by selling her female lodgers into white slavery, with two Chinese immigrants who help her do her dirty work.

Identified only as 1st Oriental and 2nd Oriental in the movie, these workers were dressed in coolie outfits and spoke a mixture of Chinese and pidgin English. They were meant to look sinister yet be laughably inept.

“It’s disgusting,” Mayer says flatly. “As much as I loved so much of the potential in this, I said, ‘That has to be dealt with, or it’s untenable.’ It’s such a blight on that story. So we changed it.”

Mrs. Meers’ workers have been thoroughly re-imagined. For a while, the creators toyed with the idea of substituting generic white thugs, but then Mayer thought up a theatrical flourish that enables the Chinese-immigrant characters to, shall we say, speak in their own voice.

The team asks that the device not be revealed, but Mayer says that it’s introduced at the top of the show, and “in one simple stroke, we home in on the tone of the evening. It subverts all of your expectations. Lights-up on these two faces, and you are expecting to hear pidgin English. But you don’t. So you are challenged, instantly. You think you know what this is going to be; you think you know who those two people are. Well, you don’t.”

What’s more, the characters now have names, Bun Foo and Ching Ho, and they have strong motivation to work for Mrs. Meers, though they dislike doing so. New immigrants, they are brothers whose mother is ill back in Hong Kong. Mrs. Meers has promised to bring her over, but only if the brothers do everything she says.

Carroll, who plays Mrs. Meers, applauds the changes, saying: “My own grandfather came here from Ireland, to send money back, to bring his brother here. This is where you came to get the money, to bring your family, to have a better life. It’s still happening today.”

Francis Jue, who plays Bun Foo, agrees. The brothers “fall in love; they have aspirations just like the other characters do. We sing and dance just like the rest of them do. It’s not often that you see Asian American characters realized as fully fleshed people in musicals these days.”

Another key change involves Muzzy Van Hossmere, the fabulously wealthy widowed socialite portrayed by Channing in the movie. She is envisioned here as a glamorous, Josephine Baker type who mixes easily in any crowd.

Tonya Pinkins, who plays Muzzy, praises the creators for depicting “a real world, a real New York” in the ‘20s, “when blacks and whites were mingling more than ever.” She notes that this was the time when whites routinely traveled to Harlem to visit its nightclubs, including the famed Cotton Club, and to partake of its literary and artistic renaissance.

It was a time of “possibility,” says Pinkins, who won a featured actress Tony Award in 1992 for “Jelly’s Last Jam.” “People didn’t think there was going to be racism anymore.”

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Despite the top-to-bottom rethinking of the show, the creators hope they’ve left behind the qualities that drew them to the project.

First and foremost, “Thoroughly Modern Millie” is a love story, they say, even if it takes Millie awhile to figure that out.

Her ideas are shaped by the fact that she’s part of that initial flowering of women’s equality, just after women secured the right to vote. Determined to meet men on their own terms, she lands a job working for successful, single Trevor Graydon (Marc Kudisch), whom she hopes to so impress that he will propose marriage. It’s strictly a business proposition, with no room for romance.

Meanwhile, she suppresses her attraction to Jimmy (Jim Stanek), a charming, fun-loving guy who puppyishly follows her around, because he shows no signs of amounting to anything.

“The idea of following your heart is what gets Millie from Kansas to New York,” Scanlan says. “Based on what she perceives to be the thinking of the day,” however, she decides “that certain parts of her heart”--i.e., the romantic parts--”are not worth anything, so she’s going to put those away. But the play is saying: No, in every way, follow your heart.”

The score for the stage show, like the movie, is a mixture of standards, some with new lyrics specific to the musical, and all-new songs written in ‘20s styles. Four new songs by composer Tesori and lyricist Scanlan have been added, as well as seven existing standards, most of them from the ‘20s, with various lyric updates.

The title song, by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, remains in the stage version with some expansion by Scanlan. So does “Jimmy,” written for the movie by Jay Thompson. Also remaining are the period standards “Stumbling,” with new lyrics, and “Jazz Baby.”

Some popular numbers from the movie are gone, including the novelty song and dance “The Tapioca.” “It’s not meant to denigrate any of the songs from the movie,” Mayer explains, “but the movie just wasn’t telling the same story we are.”

Orchestrations by Ralph Burns, an Academy Award winner for the films “Cabaret” and “All That Jazz,” will be performed by a band of 10 players.

The result is a new show in its own right, the creators contend, not a duplication of the movie. “It’s the place we went to initially, to begin this, and we took a certain amount from it and now have gone on,” Scanlan says. “It is its own thing.”

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“Thoroughly Modern Millie,” La Jolla Playhouse, Mandell Weiss Theatre at UC San Diego, La Jolla Village Drive at Torrey Pines Road. Opens Oct. 22 at 7 p.m.. Regular schedule: Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Nov. 19. $36 to $47.50. (858) 550-1010 or https://www.lajollaplayhouse.com.