Great Performances: June Gable in CANDIDE
"What we had, what people saw, was a fully realized performance that was the best of acting and singing and, okay, performing. But give me as many layers as you can, and she did."
The ephemeral nature of theatre has helped to create circles of people who gather, as if by a fire, to talk about productions and performances seen. Many of us have had the pleasure of meeting people who have seen some of the legendary performances of the past—Laurette Taylor in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, Lee J. Cobb in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Ruth Gordon in Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker, Ethel Merman in Gypsy, to name a few.
Among musical performances a particular desire emerges: We may have the pleasure of the original cast album, which we have worn to crackling uselessness, now moving on to digital versions, but we want to talk about the actual performances. Who saw it? Who was there? What was so magical about it?
Few performances are discussed as much and as often as June Gable’s work in Harold Prince’s 1974 revival of Candide. As the Old Lady, Gable earned a Tony nomination (there are still rooms where people rage that she did not win that award), and her version of “I Am Easily Assimilated” is ingrained in our memories and frequently played on YouTube and Spotify. That production of Candide arrived with so much expectation. As Harold Prince told me in 2015, “The feeling was that we were avenging the wrongs that had been done to that show, and I was in some agreement.”
The original production of Candide, directed by Tyrone Guthrie, with a book by Lillian Hellman, music by Leonard Bernstein, and lyrics by—hold on—Richard Wilbur, John La Touche and Dorothy Parker, was what Prince called a “befuddling gem,” closing after 73 performances. While Candide earned a Tony nomination as Best Musical (losing to My Fair Lady), the production entered what Prince called a “cult underworld,” which he said was a good place, but that Candide was a brilliant show that everyone should see. “Candide deserves and demands a big audience.”
Here is what Harold Prince told me:
The show was a jewel that needed the ideal setting. That opinion is not original to me: That is something that had been said about Candide since it failed when it was first done. Those of us who loved the score—the show itself—wondered what went wrong, even as we knew that something did go wrong. It was like being in a car and you feel a shudder, and everyone freezes, the car rights itself, but you wonder what happened, what’s going on. You do not feel safe. You do not feel the car will get you where you’re going.
So I wanted to take the material—that great material—and revise it a bit and present it in a way, in a setting, that would allow it to shine. The material was the star. The material was the point. And I hired and worked with artists. I didn’t hire stars; I hired the best talent.
…
When you hire the best actors, how much do you have to do as a director? I think I was concerned with allowing them to do their work within that setting. I’m back to the analogy of jewels, you see, and I knew that if I had them in the right place, hit them with the right light, everything would be great. And I was right. I knew where to place the talent. If that is my gift, my contribution, I’ll take it.
…
Now you take someone like June [Gable]. I’m not going to criticize some other performances that have been praised, but which I felt were allowed to be really big balloons, full of air and taking up space. You know, you can’t miss it. The Old Lady can be horribly overdone, and it has been. You can hire someone to play it as vaudeville, as something out of the Folksbiene, and it probably will get laughs, but I don’t just want laughs. That’s easy; that’s cheap. So what do you do? You hire someone like June who can give you the elements of vaudeville that you need, but who then refines her work to such a fine point that you feel the poignancy of the woman, and June melded that woman with the company. I did not want a performance that was nailed center stage and a number is performed. Look, that was what they did with Tessie O’Shea [in The Girl Who Came to Supper]; Bob Fosse did that with Irene Ryan [in Pippin]. Those are talented women, but they gave a performance, they put on a little show. June acted the shit out of that part, as well as taking over that material to such a degree that you can listen to it now on the album and think, That’s a show-stopper. Well, it is; it was. But what we had, what people saw, was a fully realized performance that was the best of acting and singing and, okay, performing. But give me as many layers as you can, and she did, and she was justly praised.
I shard Hal Prince’s words with June Gable, as well as an earlier email Prince had sent to me. Here is what Gable—an intelligent actress as well as a blazingly talented one, who should be working perpetually—wrote back to me:
I am very happy that he praised my work like that. I never knew, never saw that! Hal was like a father to me—he knew I was wild, unpredictable and a little nutty. We were all in our 20's. He did not want any stand-outs or to make anyone of us a ' star' out of the ensemble. He wanted the show to be the star. He was careful about the Tonys because he knew that if any one of us won the award, it would unbalance the show.
I did the show for two-and-a-half years, also in Brooklyn at the Academy of Music. Some actors would die for long runs. It was great, but I am a woman who finds it difficult to remain in one place for long. I need movement, change of scenery, exciting, interesting lovers, different environments. When Joe Papp asked me to do the lead in A COMEDY OF ERRORS, I jumped to do it. That show was amazing, brilliant , but it angered the Shakespeare ' purists'. Today it would be totally different.
Hal said " Look I can put your understudy on, but I need you to come back!”
But then, I was asked to replace Rita Moreno in THE RITZ, for thousands of dollars, and my name above the title of the play. After that, I was brought to LA to do what should have become a recurring role on BARNEY MILLER. But, it became difficult to play LATINAS then if you weren't Hispanic.
All this time, Hal was calling and asking me to come back to CANDIDE . He made it personal. I explained that I Ioved him and the show , but needed to move on.
In retrospect, I feel I made a mistake. Hal loves loyalty and rewards people who are loyal to him. I never worked for him after that....[I’m] not saying that was the reason...because after MOOSE MURDERS I didn't work on Broadway again, but continued to do Off Broadway and lots of T.V. comedy.
Hal cared about me , and I'm learning more and more about the kind of man he was. In many ways, I wish I had remained in his stable of actors that he trusted. He could have asked me to replicate the Old Lady in several of his other productions of CANDIDE, but he didn't.
Such is LIFE! We make our decisions and weave our own tapestries and should never include the word regret in our repertoire!
Marian Seldes used Gable’s performance with her students at Juilliard. As Seldes told me:
One of the things I wanted to teach my students—to really pound into their minds and hearts—is that you approach and you perform whatever you’re given as if it were the very thing you dreamed of doing. If, all your life, you have wanted to play St. Joan or Medea or Amanda Wingfield, then you apply that passion and satisfaction to the television series or the comedy you might not ordinarily want to do. We have to work, and we have to work well.
…
When I was teaching at Juilliard, I would urge students to see performances that were transforming, by which I mean performances that had good material, a good foundation, but went farther, added more layers. What I’m trying to say is that these performances I wanted students to see were in a genre that might have gone one way, but the artistry of the actor catapulted it into another level.
…This was true of June Gable in CANDIDE. I was between shows at the time, so I could see it several times—on my own and as a guest of others. I love that musical.
I love so much about it, but I often had a problem with my own students when they would play to the material. They would bring an idea of a play or a playwright, and they would slather a lot of adjectives onto themselves and call it acting. This is acting that is based on things we have seen on television or in films, and we think it’s the only way comedy or a musical can be done or should be done. We all do it.
I didn’t learn about acting or look at acting with an advanced sense of things. We all grope. So I would tell students to go and see June in CANDIDE—students could get in free or very cheaply—and notice how she never adopted any of the tropes of the broad musical performer. I had sat through a number of renditions of the Old Woman’s song, and it would get very broad, very bad. It would be like the worst of variety programs on television. But that is what they knew. I do not know how the original actress in CANDIDE performed it. I do not know what the original album of CANDIDE sounds like. But I know that June Gable is an artist, and what she was doing transcended what was an extraordinary production. And those students who saw it—and talked about it—subsumed it and their work improved.
[Note: Tennessee Williams had said that the greatest works of art or love subsume us. Once people saw my notes, they adopted the same word. Marian considered it the highest compliment.]