Will Rogers' USA

James Whitmore first came to attention in movies as the second-team Spencer Tracy, but swiftly established himself as a performer very different from Tracy and with a far wider range. In the 1970s, he developed and starred in three one-man stage shows which he performed on the U.S. college circuit and occasionally in larger venues: "Give 'em Hell, Harry!" (as Harry Truman), "Bully!" (as Teddy Roosevelt) and "Will Rogers' USA" (as, of course, Will Rogers). All three were filmed, with unequal results.

Of Whitmore's three one-handers, "Will Rogers' USA" has by far the easiest structure: since Rogers (unlike Truman and Roosevelt) was primarily a performer, Whitmore can address the audience directly and perform openly without the need of stage devices to explain why he is doing so. This is a filmed performance, with an in-the-round audience present. Throughout, Whitmore ignores the camera and speaks directly to his audience much as Rogers did.

Whitmore makes his entrance as himself, offering a brief description of Rogers, and then describing the articles which he (Whitmore) will need to transform himself into the "Poet Lariat". Whitmore puts on a cowboy hat, pops a stick of chewing gum into his mouth and starts chewing. From here, he becomes the folksy Will Rogers, offering his observations on America in general and politics in particular.

And that's largely the problem with this show: although the material here is authentic Will Rogers, it's also extremely generic. Rogers is remembered as a political satirist, yet most of his political material was generic: all politicians are incompetent, all lawyers are crooks, and so forth.

This entertaining performance offers almost no real information about Will Rogers ... which is a shame, since his life and career were fascinating. Born in Oklahoma of part-Cherokee descent, Rogers developed a repertoire of lariat tricks while working as a rancher. He toured vaudeville and variety circuits throughout the world as a "dumb act", remaining mute while performing dazzling rope tricks including butterfly loops, ocean waves, body spins and skipping spins, and feats such as roping an object from a spectator's hand, or lassoing an object behind his back while looking in a mirror. At one performance, when a stunt went wrong, Rogers ad-libbed a comment: the audience laughed, and from then on he worked vocal humour into his routines.

In "Will Rogers' USA", James Whitmore pays lip service to Rogers's ability as a rope artist, but the rope tricks which Whitmore performs -- allegedly authentic Will Rogers material -- are very tame indeed. Clearly, Whitmore was either unwilling or unable to put in the thousands of hours of practice necessary to master Rogers's skills. Although Whitmore does a couple of tricks with a rope here, none of them involve spinning a lasso nor tossing a lariat: he basically ties and unties a couple of trick knots, which are much safer and more fool-proof than what the real Rogers performed.

A far more serious flaw of this show is that it lacks any real drama at all. Whitmore simply imitates Rogers's voice and delivery while he recapitulates various incidents from Rogers's life, and quotes some of Rogers's lines. Only at the very end of the evening is there even a hint of drama, when Whitmore (as Rogers) announces that he's about to embark on a flight with his friend Wiley Post. This was, of course, the flight that took both men's lives.

Will Rogers's own films, sadly, give very little sense of his stage act. To get a notion of what it must have been like to see Rogers starring in the Ziegfeld Follies, I recommend that you watch 'The Will Rogers Follies'. "Will Rogers' USA" gives some measure of Whitmore's talents and stage presence, but it says almost nothing about Rogers as a person or as a performer. Bondage fans might want to fast-forward to those knot tricks. "Will Rogers' USA" deserves middle-to-high marks for entertainment, but very low marks for informative content. My rating for this one: 5 out of 10.