The Cocoanuts, the Marx Brothers’ first film, originated on the Broadway stage, and now returns to the Guthrie stage
By MORDECAI SPECKTOR
The critics surveyed on Rotten Tomatoes, the popular movie Web site, give The Cocoanuts, the Marx Brothers’ 1929 film, a solid 95 percent rating on the Tomatometer.
“Fun puts melody in the shade,” wrote Mordaunt Hall, in his New York Times review of the first film from “that incongruous quartet” — Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo. Hall’s review noted that “talking pictures are still in their puppyhood,” and the critic focused on the “registering of the voices” and innovative camera work in The Cocoanuts.
The film follows on the 1925 Broadway musical, for which the Marx Brothers cannily recruited some of the leading talents of the day. Notably, George S. Kaufman wrote the book for The Cocoanuts, and the legendary Irving Berlin composed songs for the musical. After the Broadway run ended, the comedy brothers took the show on the road — and went back to Berlin, who reportedly wrote another 30 songs for the show.
The Guthrie Theater production of The Cocoanuts follows a 2014 run at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
“This is only the second production of this adaptation by Mark Bedard,” director David Ivers explains, during a phone interview with the Jewish World. “It’s the same creative team that helped develop it, but it’s largely a new cast and a new production [at the Guthrie].”
Asked about the scale of the Guthrie production, compared to The Cocoanuts in Oregon last year, Ivers comments, “This adaptation is not a massive scale musical — it’s one of the treats of this adaptation. It was a massive scale… when it was on Broadway. Even the revival in Washington, D.C. [at Arena Stage, in 1988], had like 16 chorus girls and just a massive ensemble.”
The 46-year-old director adds, “In today’s theater world, regionally, that’s just very difficult to produce, a musical of that size and scale, given resources. So what Mark and our team did was, we were able to keep the feeling of a large musical, restore a lot of [Irving] Berlin’s music that was cut from the original [production] and was hard to find. We did a ton of research and were able to reduce the size of the cast down to 12, and still have it feel like it’s got breadth and scale, and 18 numbers, and all the things you would expect from the Marx Brothers themselves, but without the budget nightmare of 30 actors.”
The Cocoanuts is a musical that owes much to the 1929 film version. “We have literalized the iconic moments from the film and sort of honored them in the staging,” says Ivers.
And regarding the Irving Berlin tunes in the show, he explains, “We found a bunch of half-written songs [by Berlin]. Our music director, who also adapted the music, Greg Coffin, he was in touch with the Library of Congress. We tried to find every single thing that was original to this, to varying degrees of success.”
“One thing that’s really cool with this production,” according to Ivers, is that Berlin’s music has been restored throughout the show. So a “strain that you hear underneath a scene” likely was culled from the original trove of Berlin’s music for The Cocoanuts.
Ivers is making his directorial debut at the Guthrie with The Cocoanuts. He was born in the San Francisco Bay Area, and grew up in southern California. His undergraduate years were spent at the University of Oregon. And Ivers is no stranger to these parts, having earned a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Minnesota.
And to a nosy reporter’s question about a possible Jewish religious background, Ivers replies, “Well, this is a complicated question.”
It turns out that Ivers’ late father was originally named — “this will give it all away” — Itzik Nathan Itzkovitch and changed his name to Irving Norman Ivers. Ivers’ father was “from a long, long line of Orthodox Jews, out of Poland, Montreal — my whole family lives in Toronto now — and he married a woman from England, who was not Jewish.”
The director’s father was an observant Jew, “and my brother and I were influenced by his practice; so it’s always been a healthy and wonderful part of my life…. There’s a part of me that very much identifies as Jewish.”
I haven’t seen The Cocoanuts yet, so here’s a review from the Guthrie’s new artistic director, Joe Haj, who said: “When I saw David Ivers’ production of The Cocoanuts at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, my immediate reaction was that this production is more fun than anyone should be allowed to have in the theater.”
Finally, the director mentions that the actors playing the Marx Brothers occasionally improvise during the show.
Ivers warns, “Hold your breath if a cell phone rings while Groucho’s on stage.”
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The Cocoanuts will run Nov. 14, 2015-Jan. 3, 2016, on the McGuire Proscenium Stage at the Guthrie Theater, 818 S. Second St., Minneapolis. For tickets, call the Guthrie box office at 612-225-6244, or go to: guthrietheater.org.
(American Jewish World, 11.6.15)
