More Than You Know
The Triad, NYC, June 5, 2016
Reviewed by Victoria Ordin for Cabaret Scenes
More Than You Know, Lauren Stanford’s one-woman show about Helen Morgan, the torch singer best-known for her portrayal of Julie in Show Boat (both on Broadway and in the iconic 1936 film), grew out of a musical theater history course Stanford took in college. A drama, not a musical theater major, the 2013 MetroStar winner became fascinated by Morgan’s story. It’s a story whose details are murky, even about seemingly verifiable facts like the identity of the married man she dated for ten years and the number of men she married before dying at the tender age of 41 of alcohol-related illness.
Working from three main sources—a 1957 film starring Paul Newman and Ann Blyth generally regarded as pure fiction, a TV movie that same year starring Polly Bergen, on which Helen’s mother, Lulu, worked as script consultant, and a 1974 biography by George Maxwell—Stanford offers a plausible reconstruction of Morgan’s life. No one really knows what’s true, but More Than You Know (which Stanford wrote) yields something arguably more valuable: the emotional truth of the Prohibition-era star now largely forgotten.
With its ornate though small stage and red/gold color scheme, The Triad is the perfect setting for a play about Morgan’s last night at the Simplon Club. Thirty-one may seem young to retire, but behind her impish grin and the flirtatious twinkle in her eyes, Stanford projects the soul weariness of Morgan from the moment she takes the stage in a black sequined sheath that falls just below the knees. Capturing the guilelessness of the singer famous for draping herself over the piano as she drank her way through late night shows, Stanford opens with “Nothing But” (Sam Ward/Henry Busse/Ferde Grofe). The performer sings in the stylized manner of the age while infusing songs like “Me and My Shadow” (Al Jolson/Billy Rose/Dave Dreyer) with a naturalism one doesn’t hear in Morgan’s original recordings.
Early on it becomes clear that Lulu, as Morgan called her mother, was the formative influence in the singer’s life. Men came and went, but Lulu remained.
Even after moving to upstate New York to raise turkeys after Morgan achieved stardom, Lulu and Helen remained in close contact. Abandoned by a cruel alcoholic father Lulu referred to simply as “the absconder,” Morgan grew up with a mother still a child herself. Stanford’s spare yet evocative writing details a childhood of privation and factory labor in which music provided the only light.
Her favorite job was at the Cracker Jack factory, where she inserted extra toys into the boxes of candy. The joy she reports at imagining the surprise children would feel is really all one needs to know about Morgan, who was unfailingly generous whether she had money or not.
“Stripped of privacy but utterly alone”—this was Morgan’s experience of New York when she and Lulu left Illinois. Even after she became part of the phenomenon that was Show Boat—which, even at the time, people called “revolutionary” and “groundbreaking”—Morgan’s connections remained tenuous. After being discovered by Florenz Ziegfeld (who hired her on the strength less of her talent than her teeth!), and then Jerome Kern, Morgan was plagued by loneliness. She regarded Prohibition as a “sentence of solitary confinement” and thought marriage was something people “invented to make sure we would never be alone—contractually.” But Stanford doesn’t play Morgan as pitiable. As she recounts the star’s various attempts to find love, first through an adopted lion cub she tries to raise as she would a child, and then a baby whose origins (and circumstances of adoption) remain in dispute, we see a woman-child fueled by alcohol and good intentions who maintains a sort of tragic grace through it all.
Stanford sings well throughout; her phrasing is excellent and she falters in a belt only occasionally. “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” (Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein II) and “(I’ve Got) Sand in My Shoes” (Louis Alter/Arthur Swanstrom) were the musical highlights in a show whose songs were nicely integrated with a terrific script. The phone calls to Lulu toward the end of the show bring More Than You Know as close to tragedy as the play gets, but Stanford’s artful plotting and sweet manner soon restore emotional equilibrium. When she ends where she began, with a reprise of “Nothing But,” we feel as if we have gotten to know quite a lot about Morgan and share the disappointment no doubt felt by patrons of the Simplon Club upon hearing her final notes. Under the direction of Eric Michael Gillett and Musical Director Michael Pettry, Stanford gives a nuanced, moving performance about a doomed, but improbably hopeful figure in musical theater history.