![]() ![]() The Village Gate featured Maya Angelou, then still a dancer and singer, in its “Cabaret for Freedom,” which raised funds for the civil rights movement and led to Angelou’s own life of activism. Other Greenwich Village clubs carried this torch of politically-active performances from 1958 through the mid-1960s. The Vanguard launched the careers of satirical comic Judy Holliday, who saw her own Hollywood career derailed by Red Scare accusations of socialist sympathies in the early 1950s, and of the outspoken civil rights advocate Harry Belafonte. (The club’s name itself was a sly nod to the Marxist notion of a revolutionary “workers’ vanguard.”) But he featured socially-conscious performers, from jazzmen Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk to comedian Lenny Bruce - who is periodically portrayed in Mrs. Gordon’s socialism was ideological, not institutional. A popular hangout for socialists and bohemians, the Vanguard was the first club to openly flout New York’s unwritten law against racially-mixed audiences - as did the nearby Café Society, which was closed amid the anticommunist Red Scare in the late 1940s because of actual connections to the Party. The Village Vanguard, opened in 1934 by Max Gordon - a left-wing writer with slender but unmistakable ties to the Communist Party - is a prime example. It was an ensemble production - with a much more diverse, and radical, cast. The reality of New York’s nightclub underground was not so singly subjective, a star vehicle for individualistic middle-class feminism. Unfortunately, this duality is where “Mrs. Much like the relationship between Upper West Siders and Villagers, Midge and Susie need each other: Midge has the looks, the charisma, the money and social connections Susie has street smarts, grit, and working-class authenticity. The show’s other breakout star, Alex Borstein, who plays Susie Myerson, the Gaslight’s crabby booker who becomes Midge’s manager, embodies the Greenwich Village nightclub scene’s sensibility: cynical and sly-witted, gender-bending and grungy, and also ambitious. ![]() Maiselpicks the right spots: the Gaslight, where Bob Dylan launched his folk music revolution Café Wha? and the Kettle of Fish, well-known bohemian watering holes and the Village Vanguard which, still standing, is one of the production’s few on-location shots (it’s mostly filmed on a set in Brooklyn.) Who wouldn’t want to maintain the safe, affluent home life that finally came within reach for more Americans in the fifties than at any other time in the nation’s history? If its buttoned-up norms were sometimes suffocating, a night out in the Village was enough to let off some steam and relieve the pressure. The show doesn’t sneer at the mainstream American Dream. Midge doesn’t hate her comfortable life - she wants to keep her family together, after all - and her parents and in-laws (even Joel) are ultimately supportive, sympathetic figures. Maisel captures the uptown-downtown dynamic that fueled Gotham’s 1950s nightlife. In both its characters and locations, Mrs. She was the one with talent all along, and the rest of the season tells the clever, conflicted story of Midge’s awakening feminist consciousness and comic skills. Midge proceeds to down a bottle of wine and return to the Gaslight, dressed in nothing but a nightgown and an overcoat, where she storms the stage and uproariously rips her cliché-ridden husband to shreds. In a snappy dramatization of the period’s real-life domestic relations, Joel blames his comedic bombs on Midge’s lack of support and declares he’s leaving her for his secretary. ![]() Getting him booked requires Midge bribing the club owner with homemade brisket. The problem is, he lacks talent and can only get laughs by ripping off routines from Bob Newhart records. The dingy basement coffeehouse’s open mic night is Joel’s escape hatch, where he can let loose his ambition to be a standup comedian and transcend his desk-jockey day job. For both Midge and her office-bound spouse, Joel (Michael Zegen), throwing on a comfy black sweater and heading down to Greenwich Village’s Gaslight Café is both a physical and psychic relief. And her wardrobe - from its restrictive girdles and bras to its stiff dresses, shawls, elbow-length gloves, and pillbox hats - is almost a character in itself. Midge (played stunningly by Rachel Brosnahan) is defined by her dedication to husband and kids. Set in 1958, the show deftly jabs at that decade’s conservatism, with characters and dialogue that invoke the fledgling feminist movement that would rise up by the end of the 1960s. Maisel gets the big picture mostly right. Although it’s shot through with minor anachronisms, Mrs. ![]()
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