Since it was first (and last) seen on Broadway in 1962, I Can Get It for You Wholesale has developed a lopsided reputation based on one very specific fact. The show is remembered, when it’s brought up at all, as the launching pad for Barbra Streisand, who made her Broadway debut as the harried assistant Miss Marmelstein at 19, followed that up with a leading role in Funny Girl a few years later, and became the superstar you can read all about in her upcoming memoir. But as much as the spotlight shines and has ever shone on Barbra, it’s left the rest of the show in shadow — a pity, because there’s a lot to grapple with there. And in a thornily compelling, not-quite-cohesive production, Classic Stage Company’s revival, directed by Trip Cullman, does just that.
I Can Get It for You Wholesale, as it turns out, is an anti-hero narrative in classical Broadway wrapping paper. Based on Jerome Weidman’s novel, which he adapted himself for the stage, the musical follows the rise and rise of shipping clerk Harry Bogen (a name he’s anglicized), desperate to conquer the 1930s garment district. But compared to the fizz of How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which opened a few months earlier on Broadway, I Can Get It for You Wholesale has a sour take on its glinty-eyed striver and on moneymaking in general. Harry’s first opportunity arrives when he breaks a strike by starting his own company. Later on, he succeeds in wooing away capital from a childhood sweetheart and sweet-talking a few other guys into going into business with him, bluffing about his ability to provide a down payment. Harry’s internalized all sorts of ideas about the cutthroat nature of business and has a naked desire to leave behind his Jewish Bronx origins and assimilate into gentile Manhattan, even picking up a showgirl lover along the way. Harry and the showgirl have a duet, as it happens, about their shared passion: “What savage splendor, that mating call of legal tender,†she sings; “as dollars meet in sweet surrender,†he adds; and then they sing in unison, “and when the romance mounts, bank accounts!â€
This production emphasizes — overly, in some places — the acid suspended in those charming rhymes. John Weidman, known best as the book writer of Assassins, has revised his father’s work for this iteration, incorporating new elements from the novel, including a darker ending and more of Harry’s internal monologue. Santino Fontana as Harry — a role originated by Elliott Gould — regularly comments on the reasoning behind his various schemes. Fontana has all the mustelid charm necessary to pull that off, as well as a liquid singing voice he puts to good use, though the interstitial commentary slips into “record scratch, freeze frame: I bet you’re wondering how I ended up here†territory.
It’s more productive when Weidman and Cullman dig deeper into the contradictions in the musical’s bones. The show’s tension lies between Bogen’s career ambitions and the obligations of decency and community, specifically Jewish community. Rome’s songs run along that spectrum, from the show tune patter of “The Sound of Money†to numbers like the group lament “What Are They Doing to Us?†and “A Gift Today,†set during Harry’s friend’s son’s bar mitzvah, that pull on traditional Eastern European harmonies. (The score makes for an interesting companion to that of Fiddler on the Roof, which premiered a few years later.) The musical, like Harry himself, is negotiating between assimilation and tradition. The storefronts of Seventh Avenue, as you might notice following along the skyline made of dowels at the back of Mark Wendland’s set, aren’t that far from the playhouses of Broadway.
Cullman’s staging keeps your eye on the fault lines within I Can Get It for You Wholesale at the cost of some of the show’s dramatic thrust. Revivals that excavate darkness inherent in a classic can totally recontextualize a show (as with Oklahoma!) or trip themselves up (as in CSC’s recent Assassins), and I Can Get It for You Wholesale falls too often into the latter category. The uniformly able cast, including a finely melancholy Judy Kuhn as Harry’s mother and a stoic but tender Rebecca Naomi Jones as his Bronx love Ruthie, are underserved by the bareness of the staging, made up of chairs and other elements of a factory floor that they all shift around during scene changes. That visual severity underlines the brutality — in the first scene, a young Harry is subject to an antisemitic assault — and the plaintive moments, like Ruthie’s bittersweet solo “Who Knows?†But it stiffens the lighter aspects of the piece: Joy Woods, slinky as hell as that dancer Martha, barely has any room to dance; the climactic fashion show at the end of the first act, mostly imagined as we watch Greg Hildreth’s Teddy narrate grandly in a spotlight, is a grim affair. It’s understandable to want to underscore what’s serious in the plot, but holding the lighter elements at bay doesn’t allow the audience to be seduced as Harry has been. At intermission, an audience member behind me incredulously told their friend that “this is still a musical comedyâ€; apparently, they were led by the marketing to believe that I Can Get It for You Wholesale had become something else entirely. It’s a note I wanted the production itself to take. This is about the business of selling surfaces, after all — let us luxuriate in that before we condemn it.
But there are two performances here that really do let the audience relax and enjoy, in very different ways. Julia Lester, the breakout Little Red in Into the Woods last summer, has to occupy Miss Marmelstein’s secretarial chair and seems to enjoy proving that she’s up to fulfilling Babs’s duties. She’s winningly broad, allowed to chew up the room and climb all over the set during her big solo with a voice of commanding power. You see very clearly how this is the kind of role that cements a career. (That Funny Girl revival could’ve kept going with Lester in the lead.) Then, on the absolute opposite end of the spectrum, there’s Adam Grupper as Maurice Pulvermacher, who serves as a sort of Big Bad of the garment trade. He’s Harry’s original employer, introduced as he’s grousing about his ulcers, and he returns late in the drama for a chilling, brutally pragmatic monologue that comes along with a Faustian business offer. There, Grupper is cold and still to the point of seeming reptilian, an alligator who trades in the logic of money. There lie the opposite ends of I Can Get It for You Wholesale, pulling the piece in contrary directions. The revival can’t knit those two tones together — I’m not sure if it’s entirely possible to, and at least it’d take more work — but there’s still something worthwhile in that tension. Few musicals attempt to do as much, even the ones that do get away with it.
I Can Get It for You Wholesale is at the Classic Stage Company through December 17.