Love Machinery
By Michael Feingold
April 18, 2001
...I like Faith Prince's voice—a mellow, slightly quavery mezzo—except when she blats out her top notes or belts at the bottom of her range, both of which make her normally pretty tone turn ugly. I'd gladly overlook those lapses if I could just find something else to like about her, but I can't. Her personality never reveals itself onstage, yet at the same time she never submerges herself wholly in a role. In Bells Are Ringing, she takes center stage like someone who's been told to move there; she does the bits of choreographed business in her solo numbers like an obedient understudy copying what the star did last night.
The star's absence is a pity, too, for Bells Are Ringing doesn't look so bad these days, despite the inevitable shortfall, a result of the musical theater's decline in the 40-odd years since its premiere. Don Sebesky's no Robert Russell Bennett, but the new orchestration has a good, gutty, swing-band sound, and David Evans conducts it with gusto. Yes, Riccardo Hernandez's design, with its grim steel frame, evokes a later, blander New York; Tina Landau's staging has its bumpy moments; and Jeff Calhoun's choreography offers a roller coaster's worth of ups and downs. But the ups, which include the snappy "I Met a Girl" and the sweet-silly rendering of "Mu-Cha-Cha," are high enough to carry you through the low spots, and some of Landau's cast do the rest of the toting with zesty appeal. Marc Kudisch, as the blocked playwright who's the heroine's secret crush, leans a little too realistically on the panic button in his early scenes, but that beats unreal romantic vapidity any day, when abetted by his strong presence and stalwart baritone. Toward the end, when two of Jule Styne's great tender songs, "The Party's Over" and "Just in Time," have helped Prince center herself somewhat, the love machinery that the authors built up with such careful professionalism starts to do more than merely click into operation, making you see that, if Bells Are Ringing is no masterpiece, it's very sagely built on the matrix of one, and rewards sympathetic treatment.
Landau handles it with more respect and delicacy than her downtown work would have led me to expect. An opening video montage sets the era for us, cunningly integrated with the mock commercial for the answering service that is the show's locus of operations. Landau tends to rush, a little, over the low-comic affairs of Beth Fowler, as the heroine's cousin and employer, and David Garrison (a dapper, stylized performance) as the Hungarian con man who romances her. But she's plucked a comic triumph from Martin Moran, as the dentist with dreams of songwriting whom the heroine befriends. A twitching frenzy of elbows, knees, and excited yelps, Moran's turn is the most original piece of acting currently visible in a Broadway musical: Picture a complete cast of people up to his level, and you'll know what the form's great days were like. If Landau and Calhoun mean to call them back, I wish them the best. Though there's plenty wrong with Bells Are Ringing, starting with the figure at its center, you may be surprised how well the old thing functions...