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by Catey Sullivan
For five years, actor Ari Butler has had up-close and personal access to the most exclusive halls of corporate power. In between theatre shows, Butler travels the world at the behest of Fortune 500 CEOs, called in to school the business world’s upper 1 percent on executive leadership skills: How to speak, act, stand and deliver in a manner that crushes the competition, inspires unflinching loyalty and commands utmost respect. It’s a gig that gives Butler significant insight into J. Pierrepont Finch, the aspiring corporate kingpin at the heart of the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.”
Set squarely in the heyday of the “Mad Men” era (early 1960s), the show follows the scheming shenanigans of Finch, a window washer who craftily ascends the corporate ladder with an ambition that’s matched only by his cluelessness. The satire opening Aug. 24 at Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire takes place within the offices of the World Wide Wicket Company, where getting ahead has nothing to do one’s experience with wickets.
“Here’s what I’ve learned doing leadership coaching,” says Butler, a New Yorker making his Marriott debut, “everybody kind of feels like they’re faking it. Including me. On some level, we’re all afraid of being exposed as a fraud.”
“How to Succeed,” he adds, takes the power of pretending to extreme levels in the character of Finch who is, in fact, a total fraud. “Finch is the guy who doesn’t really know anything, but manages to keep rising anyway because he says all the right things and wears the right suit,” Butler says.
It’s no coincidence that the audience never sees an actual wicket, or — for that matter — gets any explanation as to what a wicket is. Director Don Stephenson says that’s all part of the satirical punch that defines the show.
“This is a piece about a hugely successful business that doesn’t really do anything run by people who aren’t really qualified to do anything,” he says. “It’s set in the 1960s, but it’s completely timely,” Stephenson adds. “Here we’ve got this guy who has no skills, but who winds up running the entire company even though he doesn’t actually know anything and doesn’t do anything that’s useful. Does that sound familiar?”
While the men of World Wide Wicket try to outmaneuver each other in the race to the corner office, the women of the company have their own agenda. Jessica Naimy plays Rosemary Pilkington, a secretary whose dearest dream involves marrying an executive. She’s featured in the number, “Happy to Keep His Dinner Warm,” a song that extolls the wifely bliss of basking “in the glow of his perfectly understandable neglect.”
“When I first saw that song I was like ‘how am I supposed to sing this in an honest way?’ It just seems so sexist. I have to find the sincerity and the humor,” says Naimy. That humor is key — like Finch’s vacuous rise from mailroom to boardroom, Rosemary’s over-the-top embrace of vacuuming-in-pearls realness is all part of the show’s pointed satire and winking humor.
“Satire done right, it never gets old,” Stephenson says.
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