Shaw Festival
Through October 9
DAMN YANKEES Festival Theatre/Shaw Festival
There’s a similarity between sports and the Shaw Festival’s wonderful production of “Damn Yankees.”
The night I saw the production, the festival had reached deep into its bench, to insert three replacements on stage, replacements far better than the usual pinch hitters and pinch runners.
The key was Drew Plummer filling in as Joe Hardy, the man who rents his soul to help the Washington Senators beat the Yankees.
That was back when the Bronx Bombers were the most hated sports franchise in the country, and the most successful.
It was hard to beat a team with stars like Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra and Phil Rizzuto.
With that lineup year after year, trading your soul to beat them makes a certain kind of sense.
Think about it, in the best days of the New England Patriots with Bill Belichick and Tom Brady: Aren’t there Bills fans who would think about trading their souls for a winning Super Bowl team?
“Damn Yankees” is filled with great production numbers, initially Joe (Shane Carty) and Meg Boyd (Patty Jamieson), along with other Senators fans and the wives abandoned for the length of the baseball season, with “Six Months out of Every Year.”
Set and Costume Designer Cory Sincennes stages the show on a cavernous Festival Theatre stage with a circular wall of ads and news stories of the time.
The show’s script has been edited to remove offensive material, probably something which would show the attitudes and behaviors of Yankees players.
Here’s where the best role in the show surfaces, Applegate (Mike Nadajewski).
He’s either the Devil or the Devil’s chief recruiter and he finds out Boyd’s desperation to beat the Yankees and offers a trade, Joe’s soul for the Senators winning.
Boyd agrees to the deal, with an option to bail later.
Suddenly the Senators have the greatest ball player ever and they start winning, even as reporter Gloria Thorpe (Olivia Sinclair-Brisbane) is trying to find out who he actually is and where he came from.
That’s “Shoeless Joe from Hannibal, Mo.”
There is, of course, another fiction writer from Hannibal.
This is a throwback show, with a large cast and events once spread across three-acts, not two.
Richard Adler, Jerry Ross, George Abbott and Douglas Wallop built this massive set of gears to tell this fictional story of a tortured man, a desperate team, the Devil, a recruiter for Applegate and a wife who misses her man.
While it’s Joe Boyd/Joe Hardy’s story, it’s also Applegate’s story of that Faustian bargain, the Robert Johnson meeting at the Mississippi crossroads to become the greatest guitar player, ever.
It’s also a celebrity story, about which role is more important to Joe Boyd, going to the World Series or heading back to home and Meg.
In the end, we never quite learn what happens to the Yankees and the Senators although it’s a heck of a ride, through “Whatever Lola Wants,” “Heart,” “The Game” and “A Man Doesn’t Know.”
The overall story is well known and the Yankees haters are back because the ball team is back.
Shaw people built a wonderful set and director Brian Hill and choreographer Allison Plamondon did the staging, with an extraordinarily strong cast, flexible enough to work on stage not being completely sure who will be next to them on stage for any particular performance.
Pack up your hatred for the Bronx Bombers and ArriveCan and get to the Festival Theatre and see “Damn Yankees.”
A.W.
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