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Warning! There will be some spoilers. If you haven’t seen the musical
then read at your own risk. (And if you haven’t seen it and aren’t sure
where you can catch it, try a YouTube search. You might just find some
interesting “clickbait” :-) )
First of all, I have been going to Gateway since I was just a kid and
they have consistently put on great shows. It’s a smallish theater – seats
only about 500 people- so every performance has a level of intimacy. It is
one of my happiest places!
So naturally I was excited to see they had Summer: The Donna Summer
Musical on this season’s roster.
And Gateway did NOT disappoint. The casting was spot on with Renee
Marie Titus as Diva Donna, Afra Hines as Disco Donna, and Grace Capeless as
Duckling Donna. (Just a side note – Afra Hines filled in for Ariana DeBose a
few times on Broadway.) Afra was amazing as Disco Donna – she has the moves!
And I got surprisingly emotional when she did MacArthur Park. And Rene just
blew me away with Friends Unknown! Talk about an eleven o’clock number!
(OK, it was more like a ten o’clock number because the musical is
fairly short. LOL)
I did a full almost note by note review
of the Broadway version of the show when I saw it back in the ancient times
before COVID LOL, so I won’t do that here. But I will point out a few
differences.
But first – the audience. Gateway’s audiences tend to skew to the older
side. So lots of senior citizens in the audience. And in a weird twist for
someone used to going to Donna Summer concerts, this audience was mostly
hetero couples, who were more casual Donna fans. They didn’t really come to
live fully unless the Donnas were performing hits. They didn’t care about
The Queen Is Back or some of the other lesser known songs. They did get
excited for (and in some cases sang along with) the big hits. I Believe In
Jesus was very well received though, as was Friends Unknown – like I said,
Rene was amazing on that one! So in a way it sort of reminded me of the
casino shows, where the audience would be more casual fans than diehard
fans. One funny thing, before the show started – I like to people watch, and
there was a guy in front of me, maybe in his 40s, bragging to his friends
that he knew Donna’s music and back in the day he even had some of her old
78s. Umm…. 78prm records stopped being made in the late 50s.
LOL
One not so funny thing…. As you probably know (and if you don’t go read
my Broadway review), the Adam & Steve remark is addressed. So Diva Donna
explains that at a concert she was trying to get more women to sing along so
she said “God made Adam & Eve not Adam & Steve.” (She goes on after that to
explain it was a bad joke, she didn’t mean to hurt anyone…) But what bugged
me was a pocket of people laughed very loudly at that “joke”. I felt the
same sort of jarring feeling I get sometimes reading really old novels where
a character says something that was probably perfectly normal when the book
was written, but by today’s standards is racist as hell. I guess I’m not
just used to being in a crowd that would find that remark funny?
But… I was not there to see the audience, I was there to see a show.
:-) And while I did enjoy it immensely, there were a few
notable differences from the Broadway version.
Let’s start with the very beginning. As you probably know, the show
opened with a record player on a pedestal. (Quick audience aside again, the
record player and pedestal were spotlighted against a dark backdrop before
the show even started. So as people were taking their seats, one lady who
must not have been wearing her glasses, asked her husband why there was a
washing machine on the stage.
LOL) Back to the record player. On Broadway, you could see the Casablanca
logo on the record they used. It was immediately recognizable – probably to
anyone who was around in the mid to late 70s. (If you weren’t a disco fan
then, you would have known it from KISS too.) Unfortunately, Gateway just
used any old record. This had a blue label. I want my Casablanca label!!!
LOL
Another silly thing they did differently – in the fight scene with
Gunther (set to Enough Is Enough) on Broadway, Disco Donna whacks Gunther
with a copy of a Barbra Streisand book.
I found it a cute little nod to the duet during an intense scene, but
at Gateway there was no book.
In the land of a more serious annoyance, the show is set as a concert. So
when Diva Donna comes out, after she sings, she talks to and jokes with the
audience. Just like Donna used to. Gateway
opted to use a laugh/applause track to punch up the reaction to Diva Donna’s
patter. I found that distracting. I mean, I get why they did that. It’s a
small theater that has to pretend to be a big theater for this “concert” and
let’s face it – the casual fans in the audience were not invested in the
music or the performances yet. So, yes, I see the need for it, I just
personally didn’t like it.
Other than the record LOL,
the first major difference is the set. On Broadway they had a bunch of LED
screens that would sometimes display photos of Donna.
Gateway’s set was much more simple. They opted for a simple dark
background most of the time punctuated with various lighting effects. And of
course on Broadway they had platforms for the three Donnas that would
sometimes rise up out of the floor. Here they rolled in platforms from the
wings and the Donnas had to step up on to them.
The next major difference is that there is an intermission at Gateway. On
Broadway the show ran without intermission. I never saw the touring company
of the musical, so someone will have to let me know if there was an
intermission in that. I was wondering how well that would work out because 2
act shows generally have a clear logical division between the acts. They use
act 1 to introduce all the characters, put them in a situation and then blow
it all to pieces as the act closes. Then they spend act 2 putting everything
back in place for the happy ending. (Unless of course, it’s show that
doesn’t have a happy ending. Then they build up everything in act 1 and blow
it all to hell in act 2 so you can leave the theater feeling sad.)
Summer, doesn’t really have a clear
split like that. What they did was they used MacArthur Park as the end of
Act 1 and as the beginning of Act 2. Act
1 ends with the three Donna’s singing the song, and act 2 picks up with
Disco Donna seen from behind performing the song (presented only as a short
instrumental )as reporters and her handlers gather back stage. Then Disco
Donna finishes her ”performance” and joins them for an interview. It worked
very well.
Another big difference was that they dropped Stamp Your Feet. On
Broadway, Diva Donna got her cancer diagnosis (To Turn The Stone) and then
the family resolved to fight. (Stamp Your Feet.) At Gateway, after To Turn
The Stone, the dialogue about fighting is similar, but instead of leading
into Stamp Your Feet, it leads to Diva Donna and the family surrounding the
piano as she starts to sing Friends Unknown to them as a way of
acknowledging their support. The other characters quietly drift offstage
leaving Diva Donna singing it to us, her audience. As on Broadway, she stops
part way through to explain the Adam & Steve thing, and then she just blows
the rest of the song away!
There were also things that weren’t different, but that hit me
differently now I have seen the musical a few times, and now that I have
seen the documentary. For instance, when Duckling Donna sings in church for
the first time there is definite foreshadowing of the abuse she was
experiencing from her pastor. I totally missed that the first time I saw the
show. Now, it’s so obvious to me. (Plus the actor who plays Duckling Donna
also plays Mimi – so if you saw the documentary… well, you know.)
And later when Diva Donna says, “Everyone gets a gift. Your gift was for
me. My gift was for you,” my brain just went to the 1984 birthday clip in
the documentary with Donna telling her friends and family that she hoped
that she was able to bring something to their lives and get something from
their lives that is irreplaceable.
Clearly, I wasn’t there
LOL, but yeah Donna, you brought something to my life that is irreplaceable.
Now I’m gonna go watch If There Is Music There followed by a bunch of
silly outtakes and either laugh or cry (or both!)
:-)
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