Theater Review: Actor Frank Ferrante brings to life the iconic stylings of Groucho Marx

Frank Ferrante was 9 years old when he discovered Groucho Marx, watching Marx Brothers movies on TV and relating with glee to such unfettered comic anarchy. As a teenager at LaSalle High School in Pasadena, Ferrante jumped at the chance to play Groucho in the school’s production of “Minnie’s Boys,” the musical about the Marx brothers and their mother, written by Groucho’s son Arthur Marx with Robert Fisher.

Five years later, Ferrante was on stage in New York, portraying Groucho from ages 15 to 85 in the off-Broadway production of the Marx/Fisher play, “Groucho: A Life in Revue,” a performance that garnered him a New York Theatre World Award. (“I was 22 years old,” Ferrante said, “and that was my first Equity job.”)

His nearly lifelong fascination with the legendary comedian continued, inspiring Ferrante’s own world-touring, two-act comedy, “An Evening with Groucho,” returning to the Pasadena Playhouse on Saturday and Sunday (Jan. 9 and 10), for three performances.

A Los Angeles native who grew up in the San Gabriel Valley, Ferrante said that it’s a particular thrill to bring his show to the Pasadena Playhouse again.

“I used to work in a law office on El Molino and I could walk by and think ‘one day I’m going to play there.’” (It didn’t take long. While Ferrante performed “An Evening With Groucho” as a special one-night event at the Playhouse in 2013, he first realized his goal in 1989, when the Playhouse presented “Groucho: A Life in Revue.”)

The premise for “An Evening With Groucho,” explained Ferrante, is what it might have been like if the comedian had been asked to do a one-man show in 1934, between the films “Duck Soup” and “A Night at the Opera.” The central focus is on the Groucho of Broadway and early film, but it draws, too, from Groucho, the late-night talk show guest, and host of the long-running TV program, “You Bet Your Life.”

Ferrante’s critically acclaimed portrayal is more than the stooping walk, the noodle-legged novelty dance moves, the greasepaint mustache and twiddling cigar, although all are part of his highly physical performance. The younger Groucho was “a great physical clown and so brilliant at combining the verbal and the physical,” Ferrante said, “and I do try to capture that for audiences.” (His “tough constitution” and warming up before the show keeps him limber enough to “jump over couches, dance and lope about,” he noted.)

“But I have the advantage of hindsight, so I can use part of his later style, which was breezier, more casual, more banter-y.” Indeed, Groucho’s work on “You Bet Your Life” inspired much of Ferrante’s interaction with the audience, and he borrows from different parts of Groucho’s life within the piece, singing songs that came later and quoting from letters and interviews.

“As I mature as a person and as a performer and director in the theater,” Ferrante said, “I really appreciate Groucho’s journey as a creative person, his ability to survive and reinvent and tweak. And I admire his personal journey. He loved what he did and he was a genius within his form.”

Underscored throughout, the show features 10 songs from Groucho’s Broadway and film career (including such signature numbers as “Hooray for Captain Spaulding” and “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady”), and Ferrante works closely with his onstage pianist and straight man, alternating between Mark Rabe (who will appear with Ferrante in Pasadena) and Eric Ebbenga, “a couple of magnificent accompanists.”

Their role, Ferrante said, is to be “part George Fenneman” (the announcer on “You Bet Your Life”) “and part Margaret Dumont” — the stately foil to Groucho Marx’s comedic mayhem on film.

Ferrante’s homage to Margaret Dumont in the show is a recent addition. “Even though I’ve done 2,500 performances, there’s still so much to pull from,” he said. The unpredictability of his interactions with the audience and his need to ad-lib and improvise keep the show fresh, too, Ferrante said.

“I’m always looking to invent new gags, one liners, and actions, so an audience on a Saturday will get a different show than an audience on a Sunday.” (Ferrante credits Dreya Weber, his director for the past three years, as being particularly influential in the show’s revamping.)

People keep discovering and rediscovering Groucho, Ferrante observed, because “he doesn’t date. He was a transcendent talent. I’m still exhilarated by him. A lot of it is just the fact that his humor was just so honest and so free, and that’s something as a child I was drawn to. Even though I did not understand all of the lines, I was quite aware that the Marx Brothers were breaking the rules, saying things that they should not be saying, and doing what they should not be doing.

“I was taught by nuns in a Catholic school,” Ferrante added, laughing, “and I think I wanted to treat the nuns the way they treated Margaret Dumont, with that kind of irreverence and fearlessness. I still feel like he’s armor for a lot of us, for a lot of shy people and for children who discover him.

To see young people and older people, and everyone in between respond to his irreverence, and brashness, and subversive style, it’s satisfying and affirming.”

Ferrante will tour the show in the U.S. into April, then take it to Australia for two months, and to England for a day. He’ll also spend four to six months performing with “Teatro ZinZanni,” a European-style circus show, playing a signature role of his own creation: a comic Latin lover named Caesar (“I’ve done over 1,200 performances of that character alone,” he said), and he’ll kick off 2017 by directing and performing in Neil Simon’s “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” at Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theatre.)

--

What: “An Evening With Groucho”

Where: Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena

When: 4 and 8 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 9, 2 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 10. Ends Sunday.

Cost: $25 to $60.

More info: (626) 356-7529; pasadenaplayhouse.org

--

LYNNE HEFFLEY writes about theater and culture for Marquee.