Julieta Cervantes
One of the many delights of the revival of the musical I Can Get It For You Wholesale (Classic Stage Company, to Dec. 17) is that it has an unhappy ending and a protagonist you end up loathing. Both things are so atypical, especially in the musical theater genre, you think, right up until the end, that the musical will hew close to what that protagonist, Harry Bogen (Santino Fontana), tells us in those closing seconds—that he knows what we’re thinking, surely he will be redeemed in the end. He isn’t.
The route to this upending of expectations and traditions— with a book by Jerome Weidman (based on his novel), music and lyrics by Harold Rome, and a book revisions by John Weidman—is full of sparkle and lively incident under Trip Cullman’s sharp and inventive direction.
So many expectations are challenged, including the character who becomes its star and center, thanks to one song. In 1962 when the show premiered on Broadway, Barbra Streisand played the put-upon secretary Miss Marmelstein, whose song of frustration, assertion, and wisdom—which takes her name (“the drab appellation with which I am persistently addressed”)—brings the show to a bravura standstill.
