Theater Review: At Encores!, Paint Your Wagon Is Way Better Than It Oughta Be
Set in a California gold rush town in 1853, it was apparently intended to honor the American spirit of optimism in the face of privation, as evidenced by the hardscrabble and nomadic lives of the miners and their hangers-on. What it’s actually about, though, is the problem of sex when there are 400-some lonely men in town and only one woman. Not even one woman: one 16-year-old tomboy, the daughter of the widowed mayor; she sings perhaps the most awkward establishing song ever devised, in which she wonders why everyone keeps staring at her ass. Luckily, she’s taken out of commission, sex-wise, after she falls in love with a handsome young miner who is an outcast Mexican and thus courtly instead of lascivious.
But not to worry, gents, there soon arrive a Mormon with two wives (one of whom he’s willing to sell to the highest bidder) and a troupe of “French” dancing girls, available for rental. (They get a fabulous Agnes de Mille–style Dance of the Incoming Harlots.) Though the book, which Lerner took pains to promote as a complete original, touches briefly on other issues — the smallness of man in the vastness of nature, for one — it keeps homing back to its smarmy idée fixe. Over and over, it posits women as a scarce natural resource, not unlike gold, to be claimed, controlled, and commodified. This is an anxiety that ties Paint Your Wagon to other mid-century demimonde musicals like Irma La Douce, New Girl in Town, and latterly Sweet Charity. It’s perhaps not too much of a reach to say that the anxiety also reflects Lerner’s own; he was married eight* times.
