‘Woman of the Year’
J2 Spotlight Musical Theater Company
Through April 23 

The classic Broadway musical “Gypsy” builds to its climactic number, “Rose’s Turn,” over the course of two-and-a-half hours. Then, a strong, determined, independent woman faces the audience and explains herself, the forces that have been driving her, why she does what she does, and what she wants out of life.  

For a reversal of this general idea, there’s “Woman of the Year,” with a score by John Kander and Fred Ebb and a book by Peter Stone. Instead of using the entire show to gradually reach its “Rose’s Turn” moment, this story begins with that big number. 

We open with a TV journalist named Tess Harding, played deftly by Janine LaManna, accepting her award as “Woman of the Year.” In the course of her acceptance speech, we hear her thinking to herself about everything that brought her to this moment, and mostly her relationship with her husband, Sam Craig (John Leone), who after eight exceedingly difficult months of marriage has been pushed to the breaking point and just walked out on her a few moments before she was set to accept the award. The rest of Act 1 is then presented as a flashback.

Freely adapted from the 1942 romantic comedy-drama “Woman of the Year” with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, Stone’s book, along with Kander & Ebb’s score, justifiably won Tony Awards. Now the show is being briefly re-staged in a small-scale production on Theater Row by the J2 Spotlight Musical Theater Company.

In the 1942 version, Tess and Sam are journalists on the same newspaper; she’s a hard-hitting political commentator, and he’s a sportswriter. She expresses the opinion that baseball is frivolous and a waste of time for a busy nation at war; he responds that it’s a much-needed diversion; soon they meet cute and the sparks fly.  

Stone’s book has Tess as a TV news “personality” and Sam as a cartoonist. In this incarnation, Tess denounces what she derisively dismisses as “the funnies” and he responds by working a caricature (or, more accurately, a cari-cat-ure) of her into his comic strip. Once again, they manage to meet and fall into each other’s arms.

In 1981, nearly 40 years after the original film, Stone saw the need to update the general need to update the story to the present day. Now, another 40 years since the musical version was one of the big hits of the 1980-81 season, the references in this book are equally dated. Rather than trying to minimize that fact, director Robert W. Schneider has decided to lean into it, and much of the humor in this production comes from the dropping of names we haven’t heard much of since the early Reagan era, from Brezhnev to Marie Osmond to Tip O’Neill.  

I couldn’t help but think that if someone were to do a full-scale revival of the Kander-Ebb-Stone “Woman of the Year,” they might consider the notion of re-rewriting the book to set the story again in World War II; somehow the 1940s seem less dated right now than the early 1980s.  

The 1981 production used projected animated images of Sam’s character Katz; Mr. Schneider’s uses TV screens with cleverly photoshopped images of Ms. LaManna on the covers of ’80s magazines as well as, again, animated scenes of Katz.

The score wouldn’t need to be changed; it’s one of K&E’s zingiest. The plot moves along mainly thanks to vaudeville-style numbers of the kind they perfected in “Cabaret” (1966) and “Chicago” (1975). “One of the the Boys” climaxes in a Judy Garland-inspired half-time slowdown and kick turn as Tess wins over Sam’s contingent of crusty cartoonists. 

There are also snappy duos and trios that drive the story forward through musical dialog, “When You’re Right, You’re Right” and “It Isn’t Working.”  Kander & Ebb also give us one of their signature “ethnic” songs, “Happy in the Morning” — delivered memorably by Jake Urban as a Soviet ballerino in the middle of a plie — which could have been a leftover from their “Zorba.”  

Sam, pining for Tess, delivers an especially lovely torch song, “Sometimes a Day Goes By,” possibly part of the inspiration for Stephen Sondheim’s better known “Not a Day Goes By,” from “Merrily We Roll Along,” which opened (and closed) eight months later. 

As with many major musicals, most of the plot and complications are in the first act; the resolutions come in the second, along with two of the best songs. 

“I Wrote the Book” is a comedy song that marks a rare moment of introspection for the somewhat self-involved Tess.  The eleventh hour number is “The Grass is Always Greener,” surely one of the driest and funniest comic duets on modern Broadway. The character Jan Donovan is only on stage for 15 minutes at the most, yet in 1981, Marilyn Cooper was so winning that she took home the Best Supporting Actress Tony Award essentially on the strength of this one song. Kelly Lester is equally winning here.

The title role, Tess Harding, is not an easy one — she has to be lovable, charismatic, and entirely full of herself — and it essentially requires a larger-than-life leading lady like Katherine Hepburn in 1942 and Lauren Bacall in 1981, or, for that matter, those contemporary TV news divas like Barbara Walters or Dianne Sawyer who inspired the 1980s Tess. (Later in the run, Raquel Welch and then Debbie Reynolds stepped into Bacall’s shoes as Tess.)

Ms. LaManna does fine by Tess here, even though the book makes her so excessively self-involved and blind to everyone else’s needs that she occasionally loses the crowd’s sympathy.  

I saw Bacall in that show, opposite Harry Guardino as Sam, and it has stuck with me all this time. Although certain aspects of both the 1942 and 1981 incarnations are dated — sometimes delightfully so — it’s a warmly romantic musical comedy of the sort that we could use more than ever right now.