Life Behind the 'Mask'
Playhouse musical is even more compelling than the Oscar-winning film
By Jana J. Monji 04/09/2008
From movie to musical seems to be the current trend and the new musical making its world premiere at the Pasadena Playhouse is a fine addition to this tradition — more so for the story it tells than the music made to bring it to stage.
You might remember the 1985 movie, “Mask,” directed by Peter Bogdanovich and starring Cher as the red-haired Rusty Dennis, the unconventional mother of 16-year-old Rocky Dennis (Eric Stoltz), a boy with a fatal disease that causes a facial skull deformity.
Anna Hamilton Phelan wrote the movie script, inspired by a chance meeting with the real Rocky. Now Phelan has teamed with Barry Mann (music) and Cynthia Weil (lyrics) to bring Rocky and Rusty's story to the stage.
This is not, like the stage musical “Hairspray,” a faithful retelling of the movie with music. In the movie, we first meet Rocky, home alone, getting ready for school when his mother is brought home by her one-night stand. The motorcycle tribe descends upon the modest house, ready to take Rocky and Rusty to his new school for registration after running the “boyfriend” off.
Bogdanovich, in the director’s cut DVD, comments that he wanted the viewer to become comfortable with this boy, doing normal everyday things before one clearly sees Rocky’s face, before we fully understand his home situation. This Rocky dreams of going to Europe with his best friend, Ben (Lawrence Monoson) and they both collect Dodger baseball cards. Dozer (Dennis Burkley), one of his biker friends, barely speaks. Set originally to Bruce Springsteen music, the movie was released with Bob Seger songs; the director's cut DVD restores Springsteen to the score and includes extra footage.
In this new musical, which takes place from August 1977 to August 1978 with Rocky’s home in Azusa, the motorcycle tribe comes to the forefront. The play opens with the engines rumbling and the headlights blazing annoyingly into the audience. The tribe emerges from the glare, singing “Come Along for the Ride.”
When we first meet Rocky (Allen E. Read), we see only his back and a map of the United States. This Rocky doesn't have any close friends his age and wants to join the tribe on their annual run to the Sturgis Rally in South Dakota.
Instead of being nearly mute, Dozer (Michael Lanning) is the storyteller, the tribe’s historian, the life guidance counselor for the young Rocky. Before Rocky can go to Sturgis, Dozer explains, he must pass certain tests. One of those tests is bringing Gar (Greg Evigan), Rusty’s sometime boyfriend, together with his mother. Gar, however, disapproves of Rusty’s drug addiction.
While Cher played Rusty with a glamorously coiffed mane, most of tribe’s women (and men) in this stage production are on an unending bad hair day. Michelle Duffy’s Rusty has frizzy auburn hair, yet director Richard Maltby Jr. never pushes her into a less glamorous reality. Like Cher, she’s still pretty and fresh-faced when drunk and drugged, eschewing the hard realism some musicals have risked.
The script, like the movie, is sprinkled with four-lettered words, but there is nothing particularly shocking about that.
Of course, this Rocky also finds an innocent love with a blind girl, Diana (Sarah Glendening), whose parents (Brad Blaisdell and Katy Blake) live in San Marino. Rocky, Diana and the chorus sing the touching “After Goodbye,” but the audience already knows that this match is doomed — he’s from the wrong side of the tracks on top of not being the handsome young man every parent wants for their daughter.
The Grammy-award winning husband-and-wife team of Mann and Weil have crafted a score that has all the right feelings, but maybe not one filled with hummable hits. Maggie Morgan gives each tribe member personality with variations on the theme of blue denim and black leather and some have visible tattoos (makeup design by Michael Westmore). Remember TV executives once had qualms about letting a fictional character wear a black leather jacket in a popular mid-1970s TV series (“Happy Days”), and women once created controversy by wearing blue jeans and even pants to school or work.
And tattoos used to be counterculture. Times have changed in those respects, but the unkindness toward unattractive or different people remains a cultural constant.
Neither the movie nor this musical have a happy ending, but both succeed in making one admire the spirit of Rocky, who seems to have transcended not only the cruelty of his classmates and the negative reactions of strangers, but also his mother’s drug and alcohol usage. As Rusty, Duffy is sexy and tough, yet vulnerable. Here her drug problems are explained as her way of coping with her son’s disability, the daily cruelty he faces and her refusal to condemn him to the short life the doctors have predicted every year.
Read, even with the mask of makeup worn to simulate Rocky’s face, is able to convey the sensitive feelings of a boy growing into a man, who loves his mother and yearns to be loved by a girl and perhaps, even more, yearns to be normal but has been able to make the best of the hand he’s been dealt.
Mask” continues until April 20 at the Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena. Call (626) 356-PLAY or go to www.PasadenaPlayhouse.org.
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