THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
The Gershwin Brothers were long dead when this "new Gershwin musical comedy" won the Tony for Best Musical in 1992. This was because writer Ken Ludwig and original director, the late Mike Ockrent, had the inspired idea to bring these Gershwin tunes to a whole new generation. In doing so they gave Broadway a whole new vitality and put dance back center stage in the genre.
They borrowed five songs from '30s musical Girl Crazy and a dozen from elsewhere. This wasn't vandalism but standard practice going back to when musicals were only about supplying a vehicle for the latest hit songs. Directors would then engage the latest comic star to deploy some slapstick as comic relief. This show is a hymn therefore to those pre Oklahoma! days when it was all about the songs, the dancin' and the dancin' girls. If you like to spend your rainy Sunday afternoons watching the Marx Brothers or Fred ‘n Ginger movies you'll get this straight away but if not, you may find the hokey plot, paper thin characterization and the cheeky, aw shucks'ness of it all takes a bit of getting used to.
To make this work today you need someone who doesn't just understand that genre but breathes it, and you need performers capable of pulling it off. This show has all that in spades and it surpasses the 1993 West End version.
The plot need not detain you, but it involves Bobby Child (Charlie Stemp), a struggling Broadway hoofer who has resigned himself to a career in his family's dull banking business when he is sent to Deadrock, Nevada to foreclose on the mortgage on a dilapidated old theater. The town seems in permanent decline and is inhabited by idle cowboys singin' ‘Bidin' My Time'. Soon Bobby falls head over heels for Polly (Carly Anderson) the daughter of the theater owner but, to win her over, he has to disguise himself as visiting New York impresario Bella Spangler (think Florenz Ziegfeld). In the style of every Mickey Rooney film, they then decide to "put a show on right here" in order to save the theater.
Bringing Susan Stroman (who won a Tony for the original) over to direct and choreograph is a great coup for Chichester and a hint that this show has a future. It is just joyous froth, but her choreography seamlessly fuses balletic eloquence with comic detailing like nobody else's. ‘I Got Rhythm' evolves into a cacophony of percussion, using pan lids, ropes and pick-axes and nobody can finish a tableau like Stroman. She is blessed here with three leads here who are Broadway standard.
This show takes Charlie Stemp from dependable leading man (he wowed us in Half a Sixpence and Mary Poppins) to fully formed star. His singing has gone a up a notch and, while we all knew he could dance, Stroman really stretches him here such that his ballet solo ends up having the grace of a Baryshnikov. His rubber limbed gawkiness recalls Gene Kelly or Donald O'Connor but with an added quotient of sex appeal, rare in musical comedy. This lifts the romantic duos with Carly Anderson to another sphere. She is totally a match for him, especially in the vocal department, and makes Polly feisty and modern without discombobulating the piece.
Then there's Tom Edden, who wowed the theater world in One Man Two Guvnors. Stroman gives this comic master the space to deliver, as Zangler, some of the most side-splitting vaudeville shtick you're ever likely to see outside of a Marx Brothers movie. His mirror scene with Bobby is a delight.
Amidst all the comic hurly-burly it is easy to forget just how beautiful Alan Williams' vocal arrangements are. Whether it's the warm close harmonies of the ensemble or the expansive love ballads, there's an unforced simplicity to the singing, which contrasts blissfully with the mania elsewhere.
Production values are high, especially William Ivey Long's lavish costumes which give it just the right level of unrealistic yet essential glamour that it needs.
