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| Johnny Doran, William LeMassena, Theresa Merritt, Bill Biskup, Neva Small, Ericka Peterson. |
After 21 years, the Circle in the Square (when it was still on Bleecker Street) decided to
produce its first musical with this show, a work originally offered
commercially as a straight play in 1950, the year the Circle began operations. The
choice proved unfortunate, as McCullers’s poignant tale was not really suited
to the musical form, and, according to most reviewers, the creators failed to provide anything that might
artistically have justified the effort.
The story concerns the 12-year-old tomboy, Frankie
Addams (Neva Small, who was 19). When her brother marries, she is unable to bear the
loneliness of being left behind with her father’s black cook, Berenice (Theresa
Merritt), and a seven-year-old cousin, John Henry (Johnny Doran)—roles given
memorable life in the original play by Julie Harris, Ethel Waters, and Brandon
De Wilde). In the musical, the play’s emphasis on Frankie’s story is shifted to
a focus on Berenice, whose relations with her erring young brother, Honey
(Northern J. Calloway), were originally a subplot.
According to Clive Barnes, only those parts of the
show that came closest to the play’s handling of “the perils of adolescence and
rejection” worked, as the music was “thin and unmemorable,” and the play not in tune
with the atmosphere of 1971. This resulted in “a slightly pallid evening,”
despite tasteful acting and direction. Dick Brukenfeld liked the acting, the
music, and the mood, “But the play fails to stimulate because its
twelve-year-old heroine remains too much a mystery to us.” Edith Oliver,
however, was pleased with the work, calling it “a pleasant surprise. In its new
form, the show was a period piece, whose charming, gentle tone all but
concealed its strength and irony.” Regardless, the show disappeared in a week.
