'Doris Day: My Secret Love'

 

I learned a great deal of the star’s biography in Doris Day, My Secret Love but Tiffan Borelli’s performance of her was lacking in the spirit and likability that were Day’s trademarks. The show, under the direction of Melissa Attebery, had been running at the Emerging Artists Theatre’s 28th Street space for more than six weeks when I saw it, yet it had the feel of an early preview.  

I felt this right from the start.  Playwright Paul Adams uses the device of a long out of the spotlight Doris appearing in a 1985 retrospective of her life to raise money for the Doris Day Animal Foundation.  She’s being reunited with her long-time accompanist and friend Les Brown (David Beck, who plays all the male characters as well as the piano.)  This is supposed to be a joyful reunion but their wooden embrace is more like a cautious COVID encounter than the warm hug of two people who have shared years performing together and haven’t seen each other for years.

From there the pay unfolds in a series of flashbacks prompted by black and white photos projected on a screen beside her.  Day’s life was a series of traumas, starting at 15 after she had won a contest and it seemed her dream of becoming a dancer was coming true.  As she and her mother prepared to move from Cincinnati to Hollywood Doris and her friends went for a drive following her farewell party.  They never saw the railroad crossing or the train headed their way.  The crash shattered Doris’ leg, leaving her with a double compound fracture and a steel pin, plus eight months of hospitalization.  Shortly after she was released from her “plaster prison,” she was “clowning around” her room pretending to dance and fell, re-fracturing the broken leg, leading to another eight-month recovery.  This is the first story in the play, and the first example of the poor judgment that guided the rest of her life.  She admits to deserving the nickname her brother gave her — Dodo. 

“You could say that train put on a new track,” she says sunnily.   

Borelli shows little emotion relating most of Day’s  tragedies, portraying a Doris whose attitude seems to reflect the philosophy of the song she’s most known for, “Que Sera Sera,” what will be will be.  She comes off as dim-witted, with little dimension.  Interestingly, it’s when Borelli gets to the point in the show where she actually sings this song that I got a glimpse of Doris Day.  And when she encouraged the mostly elderly audience in the sold-out house to sing along, they happily did.  It was one of the few times in the 85-minute show that she had Day’s kind of spirit. 

The new track Doris landed on was first as a singer traveling with a band and then as a Hollywood movie star.  Her first two marriages, at 19 and 23, were over in a heartbeat.  The third was to her controlling and manipulating manager, Marty Melcher, who “always had his hand firmly around my career.”  She signed away her rights as a performer to be exclusively under his employ.  He pushed her about her weight, hair, pitch, age and what movies she would do, sending into panic attacks that caused delays in filming.  The anxiety also kept her from singing “Secret Love” from a film she loved, “Calamity Jane,” at the Academy Awards.  She watched it become the first of her songs to win an Oscar, sung on the show by someone else.  (“Que Sera Sera was her second song to win an Oscar.) 

Her marriage to Marty lasted 17 miserable years and left her angry and nearly broke after he died. 

Her relationship with her son and only child, Terry, from her first marriage, was also problematic.  He was raised by Doris’ mother, Alma, while she was consumed with her career.  When she visits him in the hospital after he was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident he’s hostile, and rightly so.  He’s been hospitalized for several days before she finds the time to visit.

Borrelli’s voice is pleasant even if her acting is weak.  She did have her moments in singing the show’s 14 songs.  I liked her imagining Doris’ enthusiasm for her role in the movie of “Pajama Game.”  In singing “I’m Not At All in Love” she came close to Day’s star quality.  

She’s also convincing in portraying Doris as having two close relationships.  Doris says of her “Julie” costar Louis Jordan, with whom she had an affair while making the film under Marty domineering direction, that Jordan gave her “some tenderness I would never again find in my own husband.”  

Her relationship with Rock Hudson, with whom she made three movies, seems to have been her most loving.  She jokes that she spent more time in bed with him than her husband.  The two shared a deep friendship, really enjoying each other’s company as they worked together.  They used made-up names for each other, Clara and Ernie.  Her grief as she sits at his beside as he is in a coma dying of AIDS is moving. 

But then the play abruptly ends, which took me back to the feeling I had at the beginning, that I was seeing a preview performance.  The show doesn’t just need more from the actor and director.  It also needs some rewriting.