Mack & Mabel

Well I’m heading back to every Broadway actors’ fever dream City Center Encores! for the seventh time and the first since directing The Golden Apple there two seasons ago!

And I couldn’t be happier to be dusting off the old dancing shoes to play legendary film director William Desmond Taylor in Mack & Mabel.

As is always the case with Encores!, the extraordinary productions disappear almost as quickly as they are made so grab your tickets now!

The Encores! season opens with Mack & Mabel, which tells the story of one of silent film’s first great pioneers, Mack Sennett, played by Douglas Sills (War Paint, The Scarlet Pimpernel), and his first great discovery and muse, the comedienne Mabel Normand, played by Alexandra Socha (Head Over Heels, Spring Awakening). The Mack & Mabel cast album has been treasured by musical theater lovers for decades, though only a few of them ever got to see the actual show. The late Jerry Herman’s score produced “graceful hummability” (The New York Times) in two ballads that have become standards of the American songbook: “Time Heals Everything” and “I Won’t Send Roses.” “If, during that song you feel the urge to stage an intervention to stop Mabel from getting involved with this willful cad, that is to Socha’s credit” (The New York Times).

But many more of the numbers, including “Look What Happened to Mabel” and “Movies Were Movies”—both of which were performed by Sills and Socha in Hey, Look Me Over! as part of the Encores! 2018 season—showcase the upbeat, sunny, irresistible melodies for which the composer of Hello, Dolly! and Mame is so justly celebrated.

New York City Center’s Encores! production of Mack & Mabel is dedicated to the memory of Jerry Herman (1931-2019).