Let’s Put on a Show!

John Simon in New York on the new Mickey Rooney show:

Shakespeare’s Claudio is told “Thou hast nor youth nor age”; conversely, Mickey Rooney seems to have only youth and eld, with fribble in between. Actually, he was in movies tirelessly—even a good one, Baby Face Nelson (1957)—and, at age 59, on Broadway in Sugar Babies (1979).

But posterity is most likely to remember him as a ragamuffin and a geezer, because, for whatever oddball reasons, his current Off Broadway venture, Let’s Put On a Show!, deserves Ripley-esque Believe It or Not! acclaim.

Making his film debut at 6 as a cigar-smoking midget, Rooney rose to No. 1 stardom thanks to the fifteen Andy Hardy flicks and a couple of other early pictures. Although he kept being in humdrum movies and TV shows (more than 300) as well as sundry stage productions, he lives in memory as America’s Andy, Reinhardt’s Puck, and Judy Garland’s scalawag vis-à-vis. Sugar Babies had a long (undeserved) run, largely because Mickey, his co-star, Ann Miller, and their vaudeville routines had huge nostalgia value. Already then he looked like a puckish oldster; now almost 84, in Let’s Put On a Show! he combines the gnomelike appeal of the indestructible old-timer (a kind of showbiz Mother Teresa) with the dubious luster of eight marriages, including a brief one to Ava Gardner.

The show, with Mickey and wife No. 8, Jan Rooney, is cleverly conceived. Act One is Mickey reminiscing with anecdotes and songs (some golden oldies, some pyrite ones written by himself) and well-chosen film clips. Act Two is at first all Jan, then the pair together along with more film clips—including a nice tribute to Garland—debouching on a Patsy Cline medley, one more Mickey song, and the final duet, “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love,” meant to epitomize the eighth marriage, now creeping up on its 30th year and thus outlasting the seven previous ones rolled together.

What constitutes the show’s winsomeness? Baby Face Rooney, now like Hamlet “fat and scant of breath,” lumbering with a list to both port and starboard, but with a mug still encapsulating the Brooklyn toddler and Hollywood rascal, still doing socko impersonations of Clark Gable, Lionel Barrymore, and Maurice Chevalier, still exudes star presence. His jokes may be hoary, but the glint in his eye is youthful; the footwork may be on the weather-beaten side, but his welcoming smirk is ageless. He sings mostly in bellows and muffled Sprechstimme, with in between a stray sunbeam of heartwarming song.

As for Jan, who conforms to the Rooney-spouse model of pretty and tall, she warbles like a California lounge singer with rubato-laden self-assurance and still-saucy countenance. An accomplished thrush on her own, she speaks tentatively as Abbott to hubby’s Costello, and rather overpowers Mickey in their duets. But strictures be damned: Let’s Put On a Show! is no put-on; it really is a show, complete with an apt three-piece band (and, for a bit, Mickey as jazz-piano whiz) and oodles of sweetness, charming self-mockery, and—why the hell not?—understated nostalgia.

The Best of Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.