Review: freeFall’s ‘God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater’ is ripe for these times when the death of our democracy is very real

You can always count on freeFall Theatre. Even though its post-pandemic branding urges audiences to “simply escape awhile,” Artistic Director Eric Davis always has something up his sleeve. And, inevitably, he marshals a team of talented performers and designers with singular vision. Such is his overwhelming success unearthing the seldom produced satirical musical from 1979, “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.”

Not long after I finished drama school, my mentor who championed so many acting students, left the hallowed halls of academia for the rough and tumble world of New York theater. He landed on his feet in the new musical premiere of this very play based on the Kurt Vonnegut novel. It was the inaugural show for the later award-winning team of Howard Ashman and Alan Mencken. But it struggled then to find an audience and ran a mere 49 performances. As a lifetime practitioner and musical theater specialist, I’d often wondered about this lost jewel.

We’re lucky that there is a splendid cast recording from 2017 of the brief City Center Encore’s production, but freeFall gives us a rare opportunity to experience this hidden gem fully produced on stage.

When you enter freeFall Theatre's intimate black box, your eyes are immediately drawn to a colorful map of these United States, which appears to be a large table (but actually can break into three benches). It dominates the center of the aisle stage flanked by the audience on each side. Both ends feature an entrance door adjacent to a pale square wooden shelf with 25 cubbyholes displaying colorful props, cleverly used in the show. The shelf duo is topped with freestanding letters which visually remind us on one side that we are perpetually in the Rosewater milieu and on the other that the play’s family fortune of $87,472,033.61 was a shitload of money in 1965. Davis also adds humor and context with a trio of video screens over each bank of audience members, from silent movie clips to midwestern local color travelogues to character commentary.

As usual, the entire crackerjack design team produces a unified vision with keen attention to detail. Director Davis adds dazzling video, sound, and impressively meticulous architectural props to the simply superb and spot-on work of Tom Hansen (sets), Dalton Hamilton (lights), and David Covach (costumes).

The action follows Eliot Rosewater (a goofily, naive Robert Teasdale) heir to a fortune amassed by his robber baron ancestors, Eliot’s PTSD reaction to a nightmarish WWII incident leads him to overindulge in alcohol and enter the “incurable insanity” of eliminating income inequality plus an obsessive worship of firefighting. His descent into “madness” causes him to channel Hamlet whose father “told him what to do; I have no instruction.”

Eliot embraces the utopian premise that no one person is better than another. His unshakable belief in the “Golden Rule” (that, BTW, is central to all the world’s major religions) leads to untethered generosity interpreted as madness. His socialite wife, Sylvia (Hannah Laird) can’t handle his obsessions and succumbs to “Samaritrophia.” When Sylvia brings her New York society tastes to backwater Rosewater, Indiana, Ashman manages to skewer fine dining and rural Midwestern palates at the same time in the comic song, “Cheese Nips” where she decries the “beautiful bright yellow crumbs” ruining her carpet.

One major antagonist is his father, the pompous Senator Rosewater (an ever-versatile Matthew McGee) who stands like a colossus as the stereotypical politician with one foot in hypocrisy and the second in greed. The other is an unscrupulous lawyer, Norman Mushari (Cameron Kubly), looking for a loophole windfall.

Musical director Michael Raabe commands his upright piano onstage with George Alexander on cello to make the giddy lunacy and boisterous wit of the grass roots Americana score (with Sondheim-like social commentary) soar. The opening number features patter reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan, but it’s hard to follow. At least on opening night, the balance was an issue and many of the clever period references were lost. I was nervous, but didn’t have any trouble the rest of the evening. And the miraculous ensemble cast (Heather Baird, Sara DelBeato, Lulu Picart, James Martin Roberts) sings beautifully and proves to be remarkably versatile as actors with each delivering multiple, distinct characterizations and also coming together as a sycophantic army of MAGA zombies.

Vonnegut’s 1965 novel preached social equality and decency in the midst of upheaval as our society lurched forward through Vietnam, civil rights and the birth of feminism. By the time Ashman adapted the book in 1979, huge changes were afoot. The war was over, LBJ’s sweeping civil rights legislation was in place, and Roe vs. Wade had been settled law for seven years. Income inequality was still the ongoing problem it remains. However, LBJ’s war on poverty sputtered, as did Jimmy Carter—the most empathic president of the century.

Sadly, the ‘80s exacerbated the problem by decimating the burgeoning middle class under the delusion of “trickle down economics” and the scourge of AIDS swept thru the art’s community and prematurely ended Howard Ashman’s life at just 40 years old—but not before he produced the landmark Little Shop of Horrors and a was a driving force behind the Disney Renaissance with “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and “Aladdin.”

Watching the show now even as we laugh in self-defense, one can’t help but despair as the satirical targets that both writers pillory, have spiraled down and our world is on the precipice of further chaos. Imagine what they’d do with our society seemingly deaf to the existential threats of climate change past the tipping point, gun violence where active shooter drills are the norm along with banned books. And the threat of authoritarianism and the death of our democracy are very real.

Ashman was from blue collar Baltimore and simply wanted ordinary human needs to be heard in a world that all too often bows to money. Is basic respect for others too much to ask?