Creators of Duddy Kravitz: The Musical find their ending, again

Share

A funny thing happened on the way to the Segal Centre: The creators of the new musical version of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, debuting this weekend at the Montreal arts complex, changed the ending of the show. Again.

A feature story in The Globe and Mail last Saturday documented the nearly four-decades-long effort to mount a musical version of Mordecai Richler's career-defining 1959 novel. The various show-business luminaries who have created four different musical takes on the novel have consistently struggled with the ending. In the book, the pushy title character, whose ambition is to buy up all of the land around a lake in the Laurentians, defrauds his friend, Virgil, by impersonating him in a call to the bank and forging his signature on a cheque to pay for the last piece of property. He gets his land but alienates his friends – and his beloved grandfather who inspired his pursuit in the first place.

Writer-director Austin Pendleton, lyricist David Spencer and composer Alan Menken struggled with a 1987 musical version of the book staged in Philadelphia, dropping the harsh ending for the final two performances at the behest of the producer after audiences responded negatively to the sour outcome. The revised ending led to standing ovations but a compromise that was not to Richler's liking.

Over the next 20-plus years, Spencer worked and reworked a new script and Menken changed much of the music. Pendleton agreed to return as director for the Montreal show.

One of the biggest changes was the ending. After years of tinkering, Spencer told the Globe earlier this year he "discovered, finally, that I needed to preserve not the ending, but the moral point." In his libretto, to satisfy musical theatre audiences, Spencer allowed Duddy to find some redemption (unlike in the book). After forging the cheque, Duddy is on his way to the bank when he runs into his friends and confesses his intentions. Virgil forgives him and agrees to write him a cheque, but his grandfather still voices his disapproval.

(Editor's note: The following contains spoilers revealing a plot point from the musical.) But after rehearsals started last month, Pendleton suggested a critical change, which Spencer made. Now, in the revised script, Duddy does go through with the forgery and steals his friend's money, as in the book, leading his grandfather to denounce Duddy and refuse his offer to build a small farm on the property. "If Duddy had not forged the cheque and stolen the money from Virgil's account, it took away a lot of the teeth of the grandfather's argument," Pendleton said.

However, in the revised version, Virgil still forgives Duddy. "What you did. It's not okay," Virgil tells Duddy, according to the latest script. "But it's okay." Duddy promises to pay back the money, with interest, and his estranged love interest, Yvette, offers him a chance of redemption and a choice to share a life with her, depending "on what you really want now." She and Duddy then sing one of the show's highlight numbers, Welcome Home.

"What's basically retained is that Virgil is the agent of forgiveness," Spencer said. "It just happens later. And rather than changing the choice Duddy makes to run off with the cheque, [Virgil gives] Duddy the opportunity to choose again. … In a story like this, when musicalized, there's nothing more potent than a second chance, because everybody in the world wants one for something.

"This made [the grandfather] Simcha's disappointment more powerful, which made the final scene with Yvette not seem to happen too quickly, which toughened Yvette's forgiveness by not bifurcating her tolerance into two scenes, which made the trigger for Welcome Home much cleaner and thus more powerful. And – a small yet huge brush stroke – it completely resolved [the outcome for] Virgil, which had previously been left a little ambiguous."

Pendleton, who portrayed Motel the tailor in the original stage version of Fiddler on the Roof and lived through director Jerome Robbins's constant tinkering with the show until it hit its mark, said Richler's "indisputably great novel poses a problem for anyone adapting it dramatically, right at the end. We struggled with that in Philadelphia … and now I think David has found a solution to it, and all that's happened in the last couple of weeks is we've made a slight adjustment in his solution."