Dietrich and Chevalier
Really bad plays and musicals about famous people fall into two categories: deliciously awful and merely awful. The best of the enjoyably terrible are much more often movies - especially TV movies, of course - than they are plays. After all, when you see a dreadful stage production, you’re apt to be embarrassed for the actors. Even if they’re not.
Sad to say, but the current three-person show Dietrich and Chevalier, about the love affair and travails of Marlene Dietrich and Maurice Chevalier, isn’t bad enough to be good (to say nothing of being good enough to be good).
The audience, whose average age was somewhere between 75 and already buried, mostly enjoyed it, and two of the three performers are actually professional and very skillful in the show. It’s also a delight to hear several of the songs, most especially "Falling In Love Again (Can’t Help It)."
The play purports to tell the story of how Dietrich and Chevalier met on the MGM lot, became lovers, split up and were re-acquainted at Chevalier’s post-war trial for collaboration with the Nazis. Much of this background is true, including that Chevalier was forced to appear on a pro-Nazi radio station because his mistress was Jewish, and he was told that she and her parents would be sent to concentration camps unless he performed.
The tale, however, is told in an impressively shameless and inconsistent fashion. Bad sit-com set-ups are followed by moments of high drama, and whenever possible the script shlockily condescends to the audience by tossing in references to other celebrities the pair cavorted with (e.g. Gary Cooper, Ernest Hemingway, et al.)
The whole effect is in the manner of that scene in The Agony and the Ecstasy where Charlton Heston, playing Michelangelo, is asked by the Pope if he’s "ever going to finish that ceiling."
Broadway vet Robert Cuccioli acquits himself with panache in the part of Chevalier, and Robert Corren is superb in a series of small roles. The best that can be said of Jodi Stevens, who plays Dietrich in a ridiculous blonde wig, is that she sings competently and has terrific legs. Unfortunately, she has none of Dietrich’s poise, confidence or cool hauteur.
The script is (dis)credited to long-time TV writer-producer Jerry Mayer, best known for his work on The Facts of Life. ’Nuff said.
Dietrich and Chevalier continues through August 1 at St. Luke’s Theater at 308 West 46th Street. For more information visit the Dietrich and Chevalier website.
