Bart Brings Back Burt

My wife was not a huge fan. She was toying with her cell phone as we drove to Greenbelt Onstage Theater to see a revival of Promises, Promises – a ’60s musical directed by Bart Guingona with book by Neil Simon and music by Burt Bacharach. Meanwhile, I was trying to explain to her the relevance of Bacharach to a number of today’s alternative pop bands, including Stereolab, Ben Folds, Pizzicato Five...

"That’s okay, honey," she said after a while, looking up from her keypad. "You don’t have to explain it to me. I don’t think you’re sad and pathetic and lost in your ’60s music. Nope, not at all." She flashed a soothing smile usually reserved for particularly wretched, lost dogs.

First of all, I wasn’t the only one in the car born at the tail-end of the ’60s. But never mind. I’ve always been a Burt Bacharach fan. Long before Austin Powers trotted the white-haired composer out on a double-decker bus, or Elvis Costello teamed up with him for a song cycle, I was digging "Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head" and "Walk On By." The songwriter with the suspiciously pearly-white teeth has been a cornerstone of pop music much longer than he has served as an icon of retro hipness. I always figured Bacharach’s songs would last a whole lot longer than, say, Eminem’s. That’s just common sense.

Bacharach, in addition to penning some of the most sophisticated, catchy, pure-pop tunes of the past century, was the embodiment of Sixties Hipness: laid-back, a bit smarmy, all about free love and groovin’. The guy was married to Angie Dickinson, for God’s sakes, back when she was still hot.

Furthermore, I always thought Burt Bacharach would have made a good politician. Sure, Frank Sinatra could still hold his post as Chairman of the Board. But if you needed a Composer-in-Chief, Bacharach would definitely be the man. Need a foreign policy? Burt’s got you covered: "What The World Needs Now Is Love (Sweet Love)." Tired of all the political double-talk? There’s always "Promises, Promises." And if things aren’t going right in your country, you could always get the guy to pen a little ditty to lift up people’s spirits:

Hey, what a place,

It’s got beaches and mangoes...

Part of the fun (I felt) of catching Promises, Promises would be to see how director Guingona tailored the production to Manila. I quickly discovered that not much needed to be changed. The plot, derived from Billy Wilder’s bittersweet 1960 comedy, The Apartment, deals with an upwardly-mobile junior executive who lends his apartment key out to higher executives seeking a short-term love nest. He also pines for a cafeteria girl who turns out to be the boss’s mistress. Michael Williams plays C.C. Baxter, the timid junior executive, while Rachel Alejandro plays Fran Kubelik, the reluctant mistress. The boss, J.D. Sheldrake, was played by Lee Robin Salazar and Bernardo Bernardo tore up a fair amount of scenery in his small role as Baxter’s neighbor, Dr. Dreyfuss.

As the horn-happy theme to Promises, Promises burbled up, a line of mini-skirted office girls and guys pranced onstage. A lot of frugging ensued. Rajo Laurel’s costume design perfectly capture just how hideous ’60s fashion really was. It’s like Mondrian upchucked on 100 yards of polyester. It’s like Op Art: hypnotizing, and eventually nauseating. I know for a fact that Manilans actually looked like this back in the ’60s (huge beehive hairdos and all), because I’ve seen with my own eyes the many sun-damaged photos displayed in Manila homes and salas.

Laurel’s costumes were appropriately colorful, though there was often insufficient material to cover the dancers’ ample flanks. I felt the decision to use dancers with bodies that cartoonist R. Crumb would love was intentional: their gone-to-seed sexiness in contrast to Kubelik’s waifish innocence. I could tell we were in Manila, because the male dancers had their shirttails out.

Neil Simon’s book squeezes some of the lemon juice out of Billy Wilder’s original story, though it’s still pretty bittersweet. Underneath all the swingin’ and groovin’, the story reveals a certain loneliness at the heart of city life. The musical’s most poignant (and popular) song, "I’ll Never Fall in Love Again," perfectly sums up this mix of cynicism and wistfulness in its caveat: "So at least, until tomorrow..."

And did I mention the music by Burt Bacharach? At first, I was confounded by all the frantic time changes, the musical shifts that are a big part of the songwriter’s vocabulary. But the tunes quickly grew on me, especially the duets between Sheldrake and Baxter ("It’s Our Little Secret"), Baxter and Fran ("You’ll Think of Someone," "Knowing When to Leave," "I’ll Never Fall In Love Again"), and the Four Executives, who got huge laughs with "Where Can You Take a Girl."

It’s odd, actually, that lyricist Hal David and Bacharach never penned another Broadway musical after Promises, Promises. Maybe bouncy, lighthearted musicals were on the way out by 1968, the year Hair first hit Broadway. My only real complaint about the play was its length: at three hours with intermission, Promises, Promises could have stood some trimming, perhaps a number here or there; the one-liner-filled script by Neil Simon could have been edited, too.

And a note on Greenbelt Onstage: it’s a nice theater plagued by some audio problems, particularly from actors wearing body microphones. Crackling static, and a distinct echo which made some of the actors’ lines sound like airport departure announcements, were two of the problems. On the other hand, I could hear with crystal clarity the cell phones ringing in the row behind me, and I couldn’t help but notice several patrons finding their way to their seats in the middle of the play, as if they’d just lurched into a Manila moviehouse.

None of this took away from the overall fun of Promises, Promises, though. A clever stage design employed flat panels done in Roy Lichtenstein style by Don Escudero. And while the leads may have lacked the crucial chemistry of Lea Salonga and Michael Lee in They’re Playing Our Song, strong singing by Williams and Alejandro lifted the musical material even higher than its retro trappings, showing that you can’t keep good tunes down. By the end of the evening, I even caught my wife humming a few bars of "I’ll Never Fall in Love Again," which goes to show there’s hope for her yet.

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Promises, Promises finished its run at Onstage, Greenbelt on Feb. 16. You can send your comments to xpatfiles@yahoo.com. Also, look for Kano-nization: More Secrets From The X-Pat Files, available at National, Powerbooks, Goodwill and Page One bookstores.