Victor/Victoria
The 1982 film Victor/Victoria attempted a solution to the dilemma. Inspired by First a Girl–an English film musical that starred the great Jessie Matthews and was released in 1935, the year Andrews was born–Victor/Victoria cast Andrews as a sexual impostor, and a double agent to boot: a straight woman posing as a gay-male female impersonator. Because this role put Andrews’s on-screen artificiality to work for her, Victor/Victoria–written and directed by her husband, Blake Edwards–was her most successful vehicle since the 60s. But the rest of the 80s found her back in the doldrums–where an artist of her caliber decidedly does not belong.
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What becomes a legend most? Returning to the medium that made her a legend. On the stage of the Shubert Theatre, where the long-awaited stage version of Victor/Victoria is being tried out before it hits New York, Andrews is like a racehorse back on a first-class track after years of pulling a milk cart. At last Sunday’s press opening she seemed a little reserved and tired–due, I think, to the extra hours she’s put in, rehearsing changes by day while performing at night–but the lady was most definitely in her element. Inhabiting the proscenium with the easy confidence of a practiced pro, she seems natural in a way she never has on-screen. I’m not saying she was natural–lyric theater is an inherently unnatural form, after all–but that the musical stage suits her in a way films never have, and that she suits it the way few others can. One of the last of a vanishing breed (including Carol Channing, Chita Rivera, and Barbara Cook) nurtured in the heyday of musicals, Andrews needs the distance of a big theater. There her precision, her control, her timing, her extraordinary way of cradling a consonant before spinning it out into the auditorium all work to create a reality unique to that moment in that place with that particular audience.
What’s needed now is a more powerful connection between the central characters. The friendship between Toddy and Victoria is the strongest thing in the show, but it’s nowhere near as fun as it was in the movie; Tony Roberts is confident and likable, but he’s a pale successor to Robert Preston, whose bubbly, slyly revealing performance in the film (the Music Man at his most “musical”) created a perfect chemistry with the cooler Andrews. Perhaps Roberts will grow into the part; it would help a lot if the writers gave him and Andrews a song in which he teaches her how to act like a man–a gay man posing as a woman. Such a number, written in the word-based Lerner-and-Loewe style Mancini’s new songs have affected, has terrific potential for both character revelation and physical comedy.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Carol Rosegg/Joan Marcus.
