ongoing - Sun. July 11

Do Red Sox fans go to the theater? Do theatergoers care about the Red Sox? Those are key questions facing director Diane Paulus, her cast and crew as “Johnny Baseball” goes up at the A.R.T.’s Loeb Drama Center. I’m both a fan of quality theater and quality baseball (sometimes this involves the Red Sox), so maybe I’m biased. But “Johnny Baseball” is terrific any way you cut it – and there are many ways to look at this. A glorious old-school style musical. A look at harsh racial relations in Boston and Boston sports history. A triumph of will. A redemption story. It’s hilarious and it’s heartbreaking. And look, I’m not an easy sell. Sports dramas, musicals and comedies have a checkered history. Yes, there’s “Field of Dreams,” “The Natural” and “Damn Yankees,” but there’s a lot of dross out there, too.

If there’s a “cliché” in “Johnny Baseball,” it’s that the underdog triumphs. We’re not revealing anything here. That’s history. So be it. The play is set during Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS against the Yankees, when the Sox staged that comeback – Dave Roberts’ steal, Big Papi’s game-winning dinger – to bring the series to 3-1. We all know what happened next. The biggest, most dramatic sports comeback in history, with the icing on the cake being the World Series sweep against the Cardinals.
Baseball-obsessed writer Richard Dresser and the musical team of the Reale brothers, composer Robert and lyricist Willie, set to write something about the Red Sox fanaticism – and another take on the famous Curse - after the team’s spectacular 2003 season collapsed. They did not know history would throw them the ultimate curveball in terms of the comeback and subsequent series victory. But that became part of the script and as the play opens, we find ourselves watching a dozen or so fans of every stripe in the grandstands, rooting (futilely it would seem) for their team, indulging in magical thinking, tying their own lives and fates so closely to the Red Sox it’s scary – and real.
An old black man in the stands befriends a young boy who knows everything about the Sox and thinks he knows about the Curse of the Bambino, that mythical conceit that owner Harry Frazee selling the Babe to the Yankees resulted in a curse. Nope, it’s something else. Something, race-based. And something very much rooted in reality. The Red Sox, under the ownership of Tom Yawkey, were the last team to sign a black player, Pumpsie Green in 1959, 12 years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. (The Sox had a chance to sign Robinson and passed. They also tried out Willie Mays, but he wasn’t quite good enough it seemed.)
In Dresser’s story, the real curse traces back to 1920 when a young fireballer named Johnny O’Brien (Colin Donnell), nicknamed “Johnny Baseball” by the press is befriended by the garrulous and sarcastic, wisecracking Ruth (Burke Moses) and taken to a North End whorehouse/jazz club for some good old whorin’, where he inexplicably falls for bewitching Daisy Wyatt (Stephanie Umoh), a black chanteuse. (It’s a funny scene, with the wise-cracking, heavily drinking Ruth and his buddies make merry and Ruth winds up passed out on the floor, on his face.) But a budding romance between Johnny and Daisy causes all kinds of trouble in a racially torn era. (All right, what era isn’t racially torn?)

And those troubles resurface again with the Sox when Wyatt’s son, Timothy (Charl Brown), shows up in the 1948 in Worcester to play minor league ball and earns a tryout with the Sox. This is fiction, but the Red Sox well-documented animosity/indifference toward black players is historical fact. And this reality persevered for a long time, well into the ‘60s and ‘70s. (Ask Tommy Harper or Bill Lee.) It is this attitude that is the real curse, Dresser posits in the play, not some phoney-baloney Bambino thing. To say anymore about how this curse is reversed would give away too much of how the play develops and how the characters learn from history and grow.
“Johnny Baseball” manages, quite neatly, to be both hilarious and emotionally wrenching, and to shuffle years sinuously. The scenes from the game bring chills – as Dave Roberts’ stolen base is  announced as the crowd reacts. (My wife and I were in that crowd, at that five-hour game in 2004. It felt, kinda, like being there all over again. The difference being the fans in the play were far more entertaining. Funny how that happens in the theater. They also break into song – very sharp funny song – at appropriate, or inappropriate, moments. They pray a lot. One woman even lusts after Mariano Rivera, unable to help herself.)
The songs by the Reale brothers are spot-on. Humorous and biting at times, and poignant and tender at others.

How does Tim fare with the Sox? Well, let's say he encounters the vodka-soaked g.m. Joe Cronin and Yawkey and the cronies. Not nice people.

“Johnny Baseball” had been in previews for a couple of weeks and we went opening night for the press on June 2nd. We talked to Sox iconoclast/eminence grise Lee, who saw in the play some of what he wrote in “The Little Red (Sox) Book: An Alternative Red Sox History.” He saw other things he wrote about show up in "Bull Durham,” too; heck, the writer Ron Shelton told him so. Lee was honored by both connections. He’s not a plagiarism-minded guy. (Note: I had story in the Herald, an extended interview Lee on "Johnny Baseball" in the Boston Herald, at www.bostonherald.com.)

We spoke with Willie Reale, too, who said he was “a thoroughly collected and happy writer” after opening night. And that’s saying something. There’s a lot on the line.
He explained the genesis of the play. He, a Yankee fan (yes, we forgive), was watching the 2003 playoffs with five Sox fans and recalled on the subway home they were “blinking back tears.” Hmm, this was real. He called Dresser and they talked about a potential project, “a love story thwarted by racism.” The love story here could pertain to Johnny and Daisy or the Sox fans and their team. The challenge, Reale said, was it didn’t mean much “to boldly come out against racism. That would be dull. We had to come up with situations and characters people would be rooting for.” As to the portrayal of the complicated Yawkey – a Southern gentleman and philanthropist as well as a boozy, manipulating, rich cracker – Reale said, “You can’t turn a blind eye to racism and we used it to make a point.”
His brother Rob added, “We hope it will play to baseball and theater fans, an interesting cross-section.”
The cast – practically all New Yorkers and numerous Broadway vets – were given history lessons on the Sox. We spoke with Burke Moses (who plays Ruth as well as one of the fans in the stands). He originated the role of Gaston in “Beauty and the Beast” on Broadway, but lived for a time in Cambridge, in Inman Square. Of the Babe, he said, “I know what everybody knows. That he was the greatest athlete of all time and he had a lot of appetite and excellence.” As Ruth, he does a fast-paced base trot after homering against O’Brien that’s one of the biggest laughs in the show. He initially did it spontaneously in rehearsal as a goof to entertain his fellow cast members, but Paulus liked and said to keep it.
“I like the script, and [overlaying] of 20th century America and the history of baseball. Then I heard the score! I got a gem of a part,” Moses said.
As much as “Johnny Baseball” vaguely rings the nostalgia bell for some version of the “good old days” – before the money got so huge and the game seemed to matter more - Moses cautioned, “If everything stayed the same, we’d still be a bunch of racists. This is the land of opportunity, about the pursuit of happiness.”
Does “Johnny Baseball” have legs?
“I think it’ll run for 10 years,” Moses said. “It could be seasonal, March-November.” (No, this cast wouldn’t do it. They’re here through July 11.) The question, too, is whether it will work elsewhere, like Broadway in the heart of the Evil Empire. Lee thinks it would, same way “Damn Yankees” did. That's up in the air. But it certainly works in Boston, where the audience knows (at least parts of) this story well. Never feels bad about re-visiting victory. In a couple of sense of the word.

Tickets: $75-$25. Check website below for showtimes.

64 Brattle St., Cambridge, 617-496-2000 www.amrep.org