MATA HARI

1968 Musical Play / 

Lyrics by Martin Charnin

Music by Edward Thomas

Mata Hari (1968) Book by Jerome Coopersmith, music by Edward Thomas, lyrics by Martin Charnin.

A show that closes out-of-town never makes it into the Internet Broadway Data Base (IBDB) so to have been in it is like having an intense part of one's life erased. I asked dancer, Tony De Vecchi, what went wrong.

"It was boring. Mata Hari was not interesting enough to be a main character. She went from the French to the Germans and all she did was get laid.”

Yet he greatly admired the show's star, Austrian actress, Marisa Mell. "She was a fabulous beauty and really talented.”

A chorus dancer has a worm's eye view of a musical, yet DeVecchi had put his finger on a basic flaw. Oscar-winning writer, William Goldman, saw Mata Hari in Washington and in The Season, A Candid Look at Broadway (Harcourt, 1969), reveals that the original central character was to have been LaFarge, played by Pernell Roberts, an amalgam of the villainous forces that conspired to send Mata Hari to her death.

The legend of Mata Hari had inspired Martin Charnin six years earlier when every producer he spoke to saw it as camp. One suggested Martha Raye for the title role. But Jerome Coopersmith also had a serious view and indeed, behind the legend was Margaretha Zelle, a hapless Dutch dancer who, like hundreds of other young women of the time, danced naked in cabarets all over Europe, eking out a living while hoping to snare a rich sugar daddy.

In addition to bad timing – French, German, and English lovers in the middle of World War I – Zelle was arguably not a spy at all until the French demanded she report back on what her German lovers talked about. Forced to spy by the very ones who executed her, she was a victim of conscienceless evil embodied by LaFarge, who beds Mata Hari before having her shot.

William Goldman blames the fiasco on producer, David Merrick, who refused to fire Vincente Minnelli, an Academy Award-winning but faded movie director, who'd begun on Broadway in 1930 as a costume designer, then wrote and directed musicals and in 1940 went to Hollywood where his hits included Meet Me In St. Louis, and Gigi. He was wrong for Mata Hari.

Wrote Goldman, "He had taken a deadly serious anti-war effort and directed it as if it were a Nelson Eddy – Jeanette MacDonald movie." He cites stinging lyrics by Martin Charnin about a young soldier who comes face to face with another from the opposing army, sees himself in the other – and kills him.

           He was me, Maman,

           he was me

           Just a boy, Maman,

           not a man

           Can I kill, Maman?

           yes I can.

Martin Charnin had begun his Broadway career dacing the role of "Big Deal, A Jet," in West Side Story, then directed and wrote lyrics for a dozen shows including Annie. The above lyric, sung as a letter by a young soldier to his mother, touches greatness.— Stuart Hodes

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