Everyday he’s hustlin’

Duddy’s musical lacks the drive of its hero

TThe Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz: The Musical Segal Centre, Montreal

he Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz: The Musical boasts a proficient score and some excellent performances, but the story’s point has been blunted and, consequently, its energy sapped. It starts almost exactly where its source leaves off. At the close of Mordecai Richler’s insanely readable 1959 novel, Max, the young protagonist’s cab-driver father, is boasting to his buddies about his son’s precocious achievements, as rebel, as businessman, as allaround operator. In the musical, he delivers the same speech right at the beginning, to us; he’ll be our narrator.

In the transition from one medium to the other, and from one end of the story to the other, one portion of Max’s address has been left behind. He no longer makes any reference to Duddy’s school days. Neither does the show. The whole first section of the novel has been eliminated. But it’s Duddy in school, tormenting his teachers, that sets him up, whatever modifications may come later, as a jerk. The details are mostly forgotten for the rest of the novel, but at the very end, in Max’s salute, in fact, they come back to bite, not Duddy, not Max, but us. It’s the masterstroke of a masterly book.

But you can’t do that in a musical, not according to conventional wisdom. This one, written and directed by Broadway professionals, has been in development for some 30 years, and the pre-publicity for its production in Duddy’s (and Richler’s) own Montreal has been much concerned with how they were going to manage the ending. In the original, it’s downbeat, drenched in bitter irony. Duddy, the whiz-kid who took to heart his grandfather’s advice that “a man without land is nobody” has, through wheeling and dealing and frantic hard work, managed to buy the expanse of farmland on which his heart was set. To clinch the deal he had to forge a cheque, and by doing so, he has alienated both his best friend and his best girl, neither of whom want anything more to do with him. How do you get a happy ending out of that? The word was that the authors had managed to work out a compromise. And compromise is exactly what we get.

Duddy himself, on page and on stage, is not so much a complex figure as a two-sided one. One side is the go-getter, growing up in Montreal’s poor Jewish quarter in the decade or so after the Second World War, determined to get ahead and not too particular about how. On the other, there’s the motherless boy who loves his family: his grandfather, his father, his elder brother and (with considerable reservations) his uncle. Duddy may be the youngest but, as he often and sometimes bitterly complains, when one of them is in trouble, he’s the one who has to sort it out. And he does, despite all the other balls he has to juggle, all the pressures of running a fledgling movie business, specializing in souvenirs of weddings and bar mitzvahs, while also distributing illegally imported pinball machines and brokering scrap-metal deals.

The two sides overlap. Duddy doesn’t actually want to hurt anybody, and it hurts him when he does. And it’s hard not to root for him during his first job in a resort hotel when he, the poor Jewish boy from St. Urbain Street, is mocked and victimized as a vulgarian by his fellow waiters, the rich Jewish boys on vacation from McGill. We feel the same when he confronts the powerful guys, both Jews and gentiles, who patronize him because they’ve read fancy books and have fancy ideals: a passage from the novel David Spencer, the show’s lyricist and librettist, has craftily translated into a song.

There’s comparable craft in Alan Menken’s music, as you’d expect from the composer of Little Shop of Horrors and all those Disneys; his tunes take some unexpected turns. But none of the songs feels inevitable, as if belonging to this story and setting and no other. Indeed, they’ve a tendency to stop the narrative in its tracks. The romantic songs sound especially generic; but then, Duddy is hardly a romantic soul. Choreography is vestigial, and what there is seems to be there just because. There isn’t much atmosphere in Austin Pendleton’s production, and not enough drive, though drive is what Duddy himself is all about.

It’s certainly there in Ken James Stewart’s performance, which is quick-witted and unflagging; he also sings like a bird. His only problem is that he’s too nice, a quality he shares with George Masswhohl as his cabby daddy; Max lives on the fringe of the underworld but his darker side has disappeared into his new role as an affectionate storyteller whose point of view is, as the literary theorists say, privileged (i.e. unchallenged). The actor seems uneasy but the role may be impossible. Marie-Pierre de Brienne sings gloriously, and has an appealing tender-tough personality, as Duddy’s secretary and loveinterest, and David Coomber is delightful as the trusting, epileptic pal whom he meets on a train: an encounter that prompts the show’s most distinctive number. There are other good performances from Howard Jerome and Adrian Marchuk as revered grandfather and feckless brother; from Sam Rosenthal as a silk-shirted scrap tycoon, the one character who seems nastier in the show than in the book; and from Michael Rudder, genuinely frightening as a crippled gang-boss, the onetime Boy Wonder, whom Max holds up to Duddy as a model.

And there’s Kristian Truelsen as the alcoholic British film director hired by the impressionable Duddy; we get to see his bar mitzvah documentary, pretty much as described in the novel, and it’s as wincingly hilarious to watch as it is to read about. He also shares a comedy duet with Duddy that’s too long but has its moments; it can’t, though, escape the feeling that it’s there because someone felt it was time for a comedy number. Other surrenders to convention include ghostly appearances for the hero’s dead mother and a final song entitled “Welcome Home.” It isn’t The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz any more, but it isn’t its own new animal either.

None of the songs feels inevitable

ROBERT CUSHMAN