'High Button Shoes' (Encores!)

In my recent report on some art shows I’d seen earlier this month (“Two Art Fairs & Joan Miró at MoMA,” 16 May), I recounted a discussion I had with the my graduate schoolmates back in the mid-1970s when I was an MFA student at  Rutgers University’s School of Creative and Performing Arts (now the Mason Gross School of the Arts).  “I argued with my MFA classmates at Rutgers that theater for the sake of entertainment isn’t second rate,” I reported.  “Entertainment is a commendable goal for art.”

A case in point is the largely forgotten Broadway hit of 1947-49, High Button Shoes, a concert presentation of which I saw at New York City Center on Thursday evening, 9 May.  I’d always heard the title of the musical comedy (music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Sammy Cahn, and book by Stephen Longstreet from his 1946 novel The Sisters Liked Them Handsome), but I’d never seen it or, I thought, heard any of the score—at least nothing that I identified with the play.  When my friend Diana called me and asked if I’d be interested in seeing the Encores! Production, I immediately said yes—and was rewarded with a thoroughly delightful, charming, and entertaining experience in old-time musical theater. 

High Button Shoes was considered a throw-back even in its own time—which was already three years after Rogers and Hammerstein’s far deeper musical drama Oklahoma! (1943) and two years after their darker Carousel (1945).  The Rogers-and-Hart musical play Pal Joey was considered so risqué in 1940 that a Broadway ticket broker wouldn’t sell my grandfather tickets to the show if he intended to take my then-17-year-old future mother!  But High Button Shoes was old-fashioned musical comedy, all innocent fun, fancy, and farce.  New York Times theater reviewer Brooks Atkinson remarked in his critique of the première, “Eschewing progress to the arts for the moment, the producers of ‘High Button Shoes’ have put together a very happy musical show in a very cheerful tradition. . . .  Put it down as excellent family entertainment with no pretensions to show-shop aesthesia.”

Written in 1947 after Cahn (1913-93) and Styne (1905-94), who’d been writing pop songs together in Hollywood for several years, wrote their first attempt at a Broadway show.  Glad to See You, about a USO show touring the South Pacific during World War II, flopped out of town in 1944 and never made it to New York City.  The pair returned to Hollywood and, in 1947, Styne turned to the semi-autobiographical novel by Longstreet (1907-2002) as the basis for his and Cahn’s next try for the Great White Way.

The team struck gold.  George Abbott (1887-1995), already a Broadway legend at 60, was hired to direct and Jerome Robbins (1918-98), relatively new to musical theater but a major star in the dance world (including several stints on Broadway with ballet productions), would create the dance numbers.  Comedian Phil Silvers (1911-85), well-known for his portrayals of scheming con men on screen and a longtime friend of Cahn’s, was cast as Harrison Floy; Nanette Fabray (1920-2018) would play Mama Longstreet and Joey Faye (1909/1910-97) portrayed Mr. Pontdue, Floy’s shill in his flim-flam routines. 

Longstreet’s book was shaky, according to the rumors around Times Square, so Abbott, a play doctor among his other theatrical talents, took over the book-writing—and Silvers dipped his pen in as well.  (I quipped to a friend that the character of Floy not only sounded as if it were written for Silvers, but by Silvers—and apparently it was!) 

High Button Shoes opened at the New Century Theatre (Seventh Avenue and West 58th Street; demolished in 1962) on 9 October 1947 and ran 727 performances through 2 July 1949.  (The production moved twice, first to the Shubert Theatre on 22 December 1947 and then to the Broadway on 18 October 1948.)  Robbins won the 1948 Tony Award for Choreographer and actor Mark Dawson took the 1948 Theatre World Award for his performance as Hubert “Oggle” Ogglethorpe.  

A national tour opened in Boston on 20 April 1948, playing 13 cities, with Eddie Foy, Jr. (1905-83), as Harrison Floy, Audrey Meadows (1922-96) as Sara Longstreet, and Jack Whiting (1894-1975) as Papa Longstreet.  The tour played at least 16 cities in the Midwest and Great Plains, including Chicago, Denver, San Fransisco, and Minneapolis; it closed 31 December 1949, in Kansas City.

A London production opened at the Hippodrome 22 December 1948 and closed on 6 November 1949, completing 291 performance; Audrey Hepburn (1929-93) was a chorus girl.  A television adaptation was broadcast live on 24 November 1956 on NBC with Nanette Fabray and Joey Faye repeating their original roles, Hal March (1920-70) as Harrison Floy, and Don Ameche (1908-93) as Papa Longstreet.  High Button Shoes has never been revived on Broadway, but the play’s had some minor fame with community and regional groups around the U.S., including two in nearby Connecticut. 

The Broadway revue Jerome Robbins’ Broadway (26 Feb. 1989-1 Sep. 1990: 1989 TONY, Best Musical; 1989 Drama Desk, Outstanding Musical) recreated Robbins’s choreography for three of his dances in High Button Shoes: “I Still Get Jealous,” “On a Sunday by the Sea,” and “Papa, Won’t You Dance With Me?”  Goodspeed Musicals revived the musical at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut, from 16 June to 11 September 1982 and again from 13 July to 22 September 2007. 

The Encores! two-hour-and-twenty-minute concert presentation (with one intermission) at City Center (West 55th Street, east of Broadway) ran from 8 to 12 May 2019; Diana and I caught the 7:30 p.m. performance on the 9th.  High Button Shoes was the last in Encores! 2019 series (Encores! Off-Center, the 2019 summer season of Off-Broadway musical concerts, will run in June and July, with Studs Terkel’s Working, Promenade by María Irene Fornés and Al Carmines, and Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Road Show); the season was a commemoration of City Center’s 75th anniversary and a tribute to Jerome Robbins, marking (belatedly) the 100th anniversary of his birth.  (The two previous Robbins-choreographed shows in the season were Call Me Madam, 1950, with music and lyrics by Irving Berlin and book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s I Married an Angel, 1938.)

High Button Shoes was staged at City Center by John Rando and choreographed by Sarah O’Gleby, with musical direction by Rob Berman; the Encores! orchestrations were from Philip Lang.  The scenic designer for the concert was Allen Moyer, the costumes were designed by Ann Hould-Ward, the light design was by Ken Billington, and Scott Lehrer designed the sound.   

For ROTters who aren’t familiar with the Encores! productions, they are stripped-down versions of “rarely produced” musicals, considered neglected or forgotten, with the focus on the score, performed in full, rather than the dialogue, which is pared down to a minimum.  (Encores! artistic director Jack Viertel does the book adaptations.)  The actors carry scripts and the scenery. lighting, sound, and costumes are simplified, as is the staging.  

The orchestra, usually a full ensemble (High Button Shoes had 27 instruments), is given prominence on stage, not in a pit, often above the actors’ playing area.  This leaves a relatively narrow strip for action and especially, dancing—though the choreography is always conceived to reflect the standards of Broadway, just in a confined area.  The current Encores! season is February through May every year and each show runs five performances from Wednesday through Sunday; Encores! presents three concerts a season.  In 2000, Encores! won a Tony Honor for Excellence in the Theatre.

First-tier actors and singers, as well as directors and designers, are hired for the productions—some of which have been transferred to commercial runs on Broadway (the current production of Chicago, which was presented in concert in May 1996 and then opened at the Richard Rodgers Theatre in November and is still running after 9347 performances as of 12 May, is the most prominent example).  

The concerts have proved an excellent way to see—and hear—some of Broadway’s less-well known musicals, some going back to the earliest decades of the American musical (No, No, Nanette, 1925, the oldest produced, and Strike up the Band, 1927, for example).  Encores! has been a feature of City Center since 1994, and Jack Viertel, the Encores! artistic director, has led the program since 2000, and Rob Berman (who also conducted the Encores! Orchestra for High Button Shoes) has been musical director since 2008.

It’s 1913 and con man Harrison Floy (Michael Urie) and his shill Pierre Pontdue (Kevin Chamberlin) have made a living hustling “genuine Pantagonian diamonds,” knock-off watches, and other frauds in cities like Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—real snake-oil salesmen.  They hang around just long enough to be chased out of town by the cops (“He Tried Make a Dollar”). 

They skip to the next town until they literally run out of safe places to go—until Floy remembers time spent in New Brunswick, New Jersey, years ago . . . and off they go to the town on the banks of the Raritan (where yours truly went to grad school!).  Floy sets up a real-estate scam, selling lots for future McMansions on New Brunswick’s undeveloped outskirts in  a development called Longstreetville.  (He also sells a couple of Model T’s at a promotional discount as the personal representative of Henry—that’s Ford, of course.  The cast all sing the delightful “There’s Nothing Like a Model T” while driving about the stage in a model . . . ummm Model T!  It’s a hoot.)  

The upstanding Longstreet family (yes, they’re named for the novel’s author; 11-year-old Stevie Longstreet, played here by peppy young Aidan Alberto, is Stephen Longstreet as a child), consisting of Mama (Betsy Wolfe), Papa (Chester Gregory), Mama’s younger sister, Fran (Carla Duren), and her college boyfriend Oggle (Marc Koeck), are the central targets of Floy’s land con.  

After the scam is revealed, Floy and Pontdue try to escape to Atlantic City with their ill-gotten booty (or, as Hawkeye Pierce says in a 1972 episode of M*A*S*H, “his ill-booten gotty”) and also take Fran—who’s become romantically attracted to Floy—with them.  As the con men flee to the Atlantic City beach while carrying a satchel full of stolen money, the beach-goers dance around them in “The Bathing Beauty Ballet,” staged before a row of cabañas.  Among the crowd are bathing beauties, lifeguards, other criminals, identical twins—and a gorilla.  

When the folks from New Brunswick arrive in AC (little Stevie overheard Floy and Pontdue’s plans and ratted them out), they get the police to go after the flam-flam team and there’s a wonderful chase à la the Keystone Cops right out of a Mack Sennett silent comedy!  (This is “Bathing Beauty Ballet,” one of two dances for which choreographer O’Gleby has recreated Robbins’s original choreography.  The other is “I Still Get Jealous,” a soft-shoe with Mama and Papa Longstreet.)

Meanwhile, Floy has entrusted the bag of loot to Pontdue and instructed him to put it all on Princeton in the big football game against Rutgers—which hasn’t won the annual rivalry in years.  Oggle is, of course, the star player on the Rutgers team and Floy tries to distract him and his Scarlet Knights teammates by advising them that “Nobody Ever Died for Dear Old Rutgers.”  Nonetheless, Big Red wins and Floy has lost everything.  

Until, that is, after he’s captured by the police and learns that Pontdue had bet not on the Princeton football team . . . but a filly named Princeton.  Floy gives the swindled citizens their money back, but before he leaves, he tries to sell the audience one more item of “great worth.”

In Rando’s staging for Encores!, the whole thing was a terrific time in the theater.  I can’t for the life of me see why the play’s never been remounted in New York City in the 70 years since it closed.  It’s not like the only plays revived successfully in New York have been meaningful, significant dramas—a lot of nonsense has been brought back and done well.  High Button Shoes is such fun, I can’t but believe it could be made into a hit—especially with some  really good choreography (there are lots of dance numbers).  The Times’ Ben Brantley said the songs aren’t memorable—and maybe they’re not, but they’re delightful and up-beat and can easily be performed and staged to great entertainment effect!

(There’s one possible dramaturgical fault, but it shouldn’t be a problem with a bit of fluff like this.  There’s no real romance involving the central character, Harrison Floy, and any of the women.  Mama Longstreet obviously has a little thing for the con artist, but it doesn’t lead to anything—the play’s too innocent for an extramarital affair.  Fran is attracted to Floy—and he strings her along for the sake of his land scheme, making her treasurer because the townspeople he’s fleecing trust her—but it’s hardly a real musical comedy romance.  The love match in High Button Shoes is between Fran and Oggle—and they do pair up in the end—but he’s a secondary character in the plot.  The best love song in the score, incidentally, is “I Still Get Jealous,” a duet between Mama and Papa Longstreet.

(The reason for this apparent oversight, by the way, is that in the original book for the musical, Floy isn’t the central figure.  When Phil Silvers got the role, his part was enlarged and the play’s perspective was shifted so that Floy became the main character.  That’s what Abbott was rewriting for—and Silvers had a hand in the revision as well.  But in the end, this deficiency doesn’t really have an effect on the farcical fun High Button Shoes provides.)

The acting in the City Center production of High Button Shoes was perfect for what the play is.  I swear Michael Urie (whom I saw do a wonderful physical comedy turn in the Red Bull Theater’s 2017 mounting of Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector—see my report for Rick On Theater on 12 June 2017) was channeling Silvers (whom Urie’s really too young to know); he even found Silvers’s black-framed eyeglasses somewhere.  

Urie sings more than passably and can hoof enough to get by, but when it comes to verbal and physical humor, he’s no second banana.  He had less physical comedy here than in the Gogol, but when he and Chamberlin got going in their flam-flam routines and other two-hand scenes, you’d think they were old hands at playing off one another.  (The Encores! concerts have very little rehearsal time, so this kind of work must have come naturally to both actors.  Kudos to them both!) 

The rest of the company was fine, but the real stars of Encores! High Button Shoes were Sarah O’Gleby’s charming and spritely dances and the cast’s rendering of Hugh Martin’s vocal arrangements.  I also have to compliment Allen Moyer on his designs for the Atlantic City beach scenes in act two; the surf and the cabañas were wonderfully depicted—and the cut-out Model T, which came early in act one so that it set a marvelous tone for the rest of the show, was a terrific sight gag.

The press coverage of the concert was small.  Show-Score tallied just 15 published reviews as of 17 May, and the average score was only 56.  The highest score was 75 for Theater Reviews From My Seat, followed by two 70’s (Broadway World and New York Stage Review); the lowest-rated reviews were five 45’s, including amNew York, TheaterMania, Talkin’ Broadway, and New York Theatre Guide.  Twenty percent of the notices were positive, 47% were mixed, and 33% were negative.  My survey will include 10 reviews.

In a review entitled “Skip this clunky musical revival” in amNew York, Matt Windman characterized the Encores! production as “lumbering and tiring,” proving why, he asserted, High Button Shoes “is hardly ever performed nowadays.”  Windman does add that High Button Shoes does have “a madcap vaudeville spirit running through it” (and “may be the only musical ever set in New Brunswick, New Jersey”), but he argued, “Much of the plotting is clunky and outright baffling, and the so-so score lacks any songs that are well-remembered today.” 

The amNY reviewer, whose notice received one of Show-Score’s low-score 45’s, determined that the Encores! revival “suggests that without an ace comedian like Silvers, ‘High Button Shoes’ lacks the substance to justify a professional revival . . . .  Then again, with more inspiration and better comic ingenuity, ‘High Button Shoes’ might have at least been more fun.”  He reported that Urie “appears to be impersonating Silvers’ antic disposition the entire time” and the “actors playing the local community’s straight-laced characters . . . seem ill at ease and unsure whether to approach the material from a standpoint of sincerity or satire.” 

Obviously, from what I’ve already said, I don’t agree with Windman’s conclusions, but Ben Brantley was cool on the show as well, his New York Times review scoring only 55 on the survey website.  He suggested that theatergoers looking for “a revival that lets a cheerful old American musical remain its cheerful old self, with any inner darkness undisclosed” might be happy with High Button Shoes, which he labeled “a nearly forgotten frolic” with “the approximate fizz and flavor of a vanilla egg cream.”  Brantley condensed the theatrical experience as summoning “the high jinks of vaudeville, burlesque and peppy college-themed fare of yore.”  “That’s not an assessment to make the heart beat faster,” wrote the Timesman, and “the charms of this ‘Shoes’ are of a hazy strain.” 

Brantley summed the “entire production” up as seeming “to take place under a double glaze of nostalgia—of remembering a more innocent time’s remembrance of a more innocent time.”  The review-writer added that “the production creates a bright, daytime world in which sunshine comes in shades of ice-cream parlor pastels,” praising the work of set designer Moyer, costumer Hould-Ward, and lighting designer Billington.  

Though saying that Urie “offers a bright, tooth-flashing facsimile of the Silvers grin here” and “has the rim-shot-inspiring vaudeville delivery down cold [while] he remains as Gumby-like as ever,” Brantley continued, “It must be said that he has only a touch-and-go relationship with a melody line” and “he lacks the streak of shiny malice that gave an edge to Silvers’s clowning.”  The reviewer’s final assessment was, “Mr. Urie gives a characteristically skillful performance, but it feels pasted on.” 

Aside from “Bathing Beauty Ballet,” Bratley asserted, “none of the musical numbers land with the impact that makes audiences clap their hands raw.”  He went on to adjudge that the “music is genially, forgettably melodic” and that “score for ‘Shoes’ is rendered here with a swoony lushness by the wonderful Encores! orchestra.”  Brantley concluded, however, that “it seems to evaporate even as you listen.  Like the production as a whole, it somehow reminds you of a generic host of golden-age musicals without ever staking a claim to its own unassailable identity.”

In the New York Observer, Robert Gottlieb dubbed Encores! High Button Shoes “pretty terrible” and a “mess” except for a few highlights.  Gottlieb said the first act was “endless” and had “no coherence, no charm, and lots of puerile jokes.”  The Observer reviewer continued: “The Jule Styne-Sammy Cahn score is derivative and second-rate.  The Encores! performances were efficiently shticky,” with the exception of Kevin Chamberlin, who alone was “three dimensional.”  “As for the Bathing Beauty Ballet itself,” the one dance number Gottlieb liked, “it lived up to its huge reputation, even though the stage of the City Center was too small for it: it looked reduced.”

TheaterMania’s David Gordon, in another notice that scored only 45, pronounced, “The only reason to see” the Encores! High Button Shoes was the “Bathing Beauty Ballet,” which the review-writer labeled “10 or so fleeting minutes of heaven.”  “Until that moment,” observed Gordon, “John Rando's production of this 1947 tuner lurches from tepid to tiresome: an assortment of enthusiastic actors lost in a sea of passé jokes and just-OK songs.”  The TM reviewer declared, “I'd . . . encourage Encores! to just present this sequence and cut the rest of the show.” 

Despite praise for Moyer’s sets, Hould-Ward’s costumes, Billington’s lighting, Berman’s musical direction, and Lang’s orchestrations as “traditionally superb,” Gordon reported that “Rando’s staging is, in a word, rudderless.”  The reviewer asserted, “The production just isn’t ready for prime time, and that extends to the actors.”  He explained, “The jokes land with a thud, the pacing is lugubrious, and the whole thing has a very strange aura of melancholy about it.” 

On Theater Reviews From My Seat, the lone 75 in Show-Score’s round-up, Joe Lombardi described High Button Shoes as “Broadway musical comedy filtered through a vaudeville lens.  Slapstick humor given a burlesque styling.”  He continued, “Some of the comedy is silly and dated but I still chuckled” and added, “The humor verges on titillatingly naughty.”  Lombardi reminded us, “The big reason to revisit High Button Shoes, however, is for the choreography of the ‘Bathing Beauty Ballet.’” 

The Theater Reviews writer pointed out, “There are some very good songs including the forgotten hit, ‘Papa, Won’t You Dance With Me?’” (a pop hit for the late Doris Day), but demurred that “I find it hard to make an argument for High Button Shoes as a great musical.”  The review-writer concluded, “If you care to take a swim in musical theater history where football and vaudeville could amusingly coexist on stage, High Button Shoes is worth the plunge.”

Michael Dale of Broadway World (a 70 on Show-Score) acknowledged that High Button Shoes “is not exactly a forgotten gem,” but it’s still “a worthy selection for Encores! to explore” as “a great example of the type of star vehicle shows that remained popular on post-OKLAHOMA! Broadway.”  Then Dale asserted that “the main reason for Encores! to bring back the smash hit 1947 musical comedy” was the “Bathing Beauty Ballet,” that “madcap mayhem of the Mack Sennett-inspired” display of “crazy cacophony of choreographic chaos.”  The reviewer reported that “the talented company of dancing comedians brings down the house.” 

Except for “I Still Get Jealous” and “Papa, Won’t You Dance with Me,” Dale noted, the “rest is a pleasant, though not especially distinguished collection of generic ballads and novelty numbers.”  Dale also found that Urie’s channeling of Silvers “didn't seem a comfortable fit,” but acknowledged that with Encores! short rehearsal schedule, the opening-night performance might not have been quite fully baked.

On Theater Pizzazz, Brian Scott Lipton (in another 55-rated review) pointed out that “our tastes in musicals have evolved so much over the past 70 years, it can be a little hard to understand why this 1947 romp ran for nearly two years.  Still,” he continued, “that’s not to say there aren’t enough enjoyable moments in John Rando’s production to merit a visit if you keep your expectations in check.”  The songs, with the exceptions of the two numbers mentioned already, is “less-than stellar . . . made to sound a bit better than they are by Rob Berman and the Encores! orchestra.”  Lipton concluded, “In the long run, ‘High Button Shoes’ won’t go down as a high mark in the history of musical theater—or even Encores! presentations–-but I was happy to have a chance to see it.”

Talkin’ Broadway’s Howard Miller proclaimed, “High Button Shoes . . . has not withstood the test of time in the seven decades since its initial run, at least not by the evidence of the deflated Encores! production.”   Like other reviewers, Miller found that “Urie does his best here to sell us in the same manner, but despite all the charm he can muster, Silvers’ checkered suit simply does not fit his shoulders.”  The plot, said the TB reviewer, “makes little sense” and “[u]nder John Rando’s direction, almost every flaw is emphasized, while the show’s strengths (and there definitely are some) are downplayed.” 

Except for “Bathing Beauty Ballet,” asserted Miller, whose notice also scored the low 45, “the dancing . . . is a mishmash of styles.”  The reviewer felt, “There are some very good songs scattered here and there, including ‘Can’t You Just See Yourself in Love with Me?’ and ‘You’re My Girl’ . . . .  But neither the toe-tapping ‘Papa, Won't You Dance With Me?’ nor the appealing soft shoe tune ‘I Still Get Jealous’ . . . manage to soar.”  With the exception of Marc Koeck (Oggle) and Carla Duren (Fran) and Betsy Wolfe (Mama) and Chester Gregory (Papa), the “rest of the cast try to rev things up with lots of frenzied mugging, but snake oil is still snake oil, no matter how you package it.”

Austin Yang of New York Theatre Guide, who rated yet another low of 45, explained the Encores! “formula”: “ A gossamer-thin plot, a charming but forgettable score, and dialogue that may fail to land even with New York City Center’s chief demographic of the affluent, elderly, and Caucasian.”  (Yang must not have seen some of the concerts I have.  Several have been quite substantial.)  “High Button Shoes is this formula at its most underwhelming,” he affirmed.  The NYTG reviewer found that “with no timeless standards, the score falls flat, and even at its best with the upbeat ‘Papa, Won’t You Dance With Me[,]’ . . . it comes off as silly and dated.”  Yang asserted, “The lifeline of the show, in classic Encores! tradition, is its dance.” 

On New York Stage Review, one of the 70’s on Show-Score, Steven Suskin declared that “until the start of act two,” High Button Shoes “is revealed to be what we’ve always been told: not much of a musical.”  The moment of the turn-around is, of course, the “Bathing Beauty Ballet” when “the audience is whipped into a frenzy of musical-comedy delight.”  It was Suskin’s opinion that “[m]any in the audience at City Center, in fact, would probably have preferred that they run the ‘Bathing Beauty Ballet’ three times . . . .”  His description of the play was a “ragtag, pasted-together, decidedly non-ambitious, old-fashioned affair.” 

On top of deficiencies in the book, the dances, the songs, and the supporting cast, Suskin found that “the current staging . . . falls flattest . . . in the star performance. . . .  Michael Urie . . .  is an impressive comic actor, and does adequately in the role; but he is not a low-comedy clown, and the Silvers gibes . . . don’t land.”  The NYSR writer went on:  “Without a strong star performance, all that’s left in this High Button Shoes is the ‘Bathing Beauty Ballet.’  And that’s not enough to support the evening.”  The reviewer did have one superior compliment to express as a final comment: “The music, at least, is impeccably handled.  Rob Berman leads the Encores orchestra with such flair that during the rambunctious overture the show sounds like a hit. But not for long.”

[Steven Suskin’s remark about the overture reminds me of a comment I made to Diana as we were leaving the theater after the show: I miss the traditional overture before the performance—and even after the intermission.  I’m sure there’s a reason it’s mostly disappeared from musical theater, that composition of snippets from the show’s score, but I’d forgotten how it sets us up for the musical play we’re about to see.  It puts me in the mood for what’s coming, it draws me into the world of the play before the actors, singers, and dancers make their entrances.  At the start of the second half, the second overture reacclimates us to the musical environment from which we’ve taken a real-world break. 

[The overture sets the tone (if you’ll pardon the pun) for the performance by giving us a preview of the style of music we’ll be hearing—and, after all, that’s the foundation of the classic musical.  The dialogue from the book carries the plot line, the story, but the music carries the emotional line, the feelings the play’s meant to generate.  The overture gives us a little taste of that and puts our psyches in the right mode for receptivity.  It primes the pump, if you will.  I miss that, and I’d forgotten how much until Rob Berman and his Encores! Orchestra struck up those first notes at the top of High Button Shoes.  What a little joy that was!]

'On the Town'

Wanna see a T. rex fossil dance?  How ’bout a clan of cavemen?  Then head down to the Museum of Natural History.  No, not the one in Central Park at 79th Street—the one at the Lyric Theatre on 42nd Street west of 7th Avenue.  That’s where On the Town is on stage.  The current revival of Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green’s World War II musical is, if nothing else, a romp, mostly a throw-back to the heyday of old-fashioned musical comedy—before it had to be rechristened “musical theater” or even “musical drama”—with a little tweaking for the 21st century.  It doesn’t deal with anything serious or substantial; it’s all about having fun—the audience in the theater; the sailors and their girls in a Lifesaver-colored New York, New York (that dancing T. rex is lemon yellow, for example); and, we trust, the dancers, singers, and actors on stage and the musicians in the pit.  My companion, Diana, said she hadn’t realized how “corny” the book of On the Town is, but I enjoyed myself despite the execrable weather outside (a drenching rain).

1944’s On the Town is a legendary American musical, with book and lyrics by Comden and Green—their first collaboration for the Broadway stage—and music by Bernstein (his first Broadway score).  To complete the foursome, Jerome Robbins, whose ballet for the American Ballet Theatre, Fancy Free, that premièred on 18 April that same year, had been the foundation of the musical, was brought in to choreograph, also his first musical theater gig.  (The original Broadway outing that opened on 28 December at the Adelphi Theatre, now demolished, was directed by the veteran—and immensely successful—George Abbott.)  It ran over a year, accumulating 462 performances; Comden and Green were among the interracial cast, appearing as Claire de Loone, a not-so-repressed anthropologist, and Ozzie, the lead sailor who meets her at the museum, respectively.  In 1949, MGM, which had helped finance the stage show in return for the movie rights, turned On the Town into a film starring Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly (as Chip and Gabey, the two other principal swabbies), but the studio replaced all the songs except “New York, New York” with Hollywood fare.

Later productions of On the Town didn’t meet with a great deal of success.  The London première in 1963 closed after 63 performances, the 1971 and ’98 Broadway revivals ran for only 73 and 69 performances each (despite the presence in the cast of Phyllis Newman, Bernadette Peters, and Donna McKechnie in the ’71 restaging).  The 1998 version had been a transfer by the Public Theater from its summer season at the outdoor Delacorte Theater which had been a popular hit, but apparently suffered from the move indoors.

Concert presentations have been popular, starting with a 1992 semi-staging by Michael Tilson Thomas leading the London Symphony Orchestra which then was remounted with the San Francisco Symphony in 1996.  New York City’s Encores! presented a concert version of On the Town in 2008, directed by John Rando, who staged the 2014 Broadway revival, and featuring Tony Yazbeck as Gabey, a role he repeated in the staging I saw. 

The English National Opera placed the musical in its repertory in 2007.  New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse mounted a revival in 2009 and in 2013, Rando directed a production of On the Town for the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, with essentially the same cast as the one that opened at the Lyric (formerly the Foxwoods, after a slew of previous renamings) on 16 October 2014.  The current staging started previews on Broadway on 20 September 2014, accumulating 288 performances as of this writing (28 June).  The Hollywood Reporter has reported that the revival’s producers are planning a National Tour in the 2015-16 season to coincide with the centennial of Bernstein’s birth.  (Some listings indicate that On the Town plans to close by 1 September to go out on the tour, but the Internet Broadway Database, maintained by the Broadway League, doesn’t list a closing date.)  My friend Diana and I saw the performance at the Lyric on Saturday evening, 27 June; we picked up tickets for the two-hour-and-thirty-five minute show (with one intermission) at TDF’s discount TKTS booth in Duffy Square.

I won’t do a detailed synopsis of the plot; it’s so well known and far too easy to look up.  I’ll just say that it’s set in wartime New York City and tells the story of three sailors, Chip, Gabey, and Ozzie, on liberty from their ship for a mere 24 hours.  (At pre-set, there’s a giant American flag filling the proscenium, and then the orchestra plays “The Star-Spangled Banner”—substituting for a formal overture—bringing the audience to its feet, the first time I’ve seen that in an American theater, though the Brits still do it.)  During their day in the Big City, they plan to see all the famous sights and “pick up a date . . . .  Maybe seven . . . .  Or eight” on their way.  They do less well with the first goal than the second, as Gabey, the romantic, falls in love with the photo on the subway of the new Miss Turnstiles, Ivy Smith (there was an actual Miss Subways contest from 1941 to 1976); Ozzie, the stud, meets Claire de Loone, an anthropologist working at the Museum of Natural History, and they get “Carried Away” (the raucous number, written by Comden and Green for themselves, that includes the dancing T. rex—an honest-to-God hoot); and the schedule-making, sight-seeking Chip (whose family name is Offenblock—get it?) finds trouser-chasing Hildy (for Brunhilde, no less) Esterhazy in wait in her cab for a likely passenger.  The story’s mostly improbable—especially if you actually know New York City!—but no one cares, because it’s all a helluva fantasy and part of the fun is seeing the shipmates get into difficulties (they start right out when Gabey removes the poster of Ivy from its frame and an old lady rats his theft of city property to a cop) and then get out pretty much by dumb luck.  You know they will, but it’s how it happens that’s the heart of the play.  So, hang on, for just as Hildy gives Chip a whirlwind, high-speed tour of the entire city (she can’t wait to get him to “Come Up to My Place”), Comden, Green, Bernstein, Rando, Joshua Bergasse (the choreographer who drew from Robbins’s spirit), and Beowulf Boritt (the set and projection designer) give us one helluva view of this “vistor’s place”!  (The New York City PR organization has recently—just about when On the Town opened—launched an ad campaign to urge New Yorkers to “See Your City.”  If city-dwellers don’t want to be actual tourists in their hometown, a visit to On the Town comes close to being a virtual substitute.  But with singing and dancing.)

(A joke in Comden and Green’s book is that Chip has a guidebook his father gave him from the older man’s visit to the City in 1934.  Most of the places in it the sailor’s supposed to see—“I promised Daddy I wouldn't miss on any”—were gone by 1944, like the Hippodrome, which closed in 1939; the famous Woolworth Building, which Chip reads was the tallest building in the world, no longer holds that title, Hildy tells him, now that they have the Empire State.  Since the play’s first run, however, many of the places named in the libretto are also gone now, too; the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where the men’s ship is docked, closed in 1966, for instance, and though the Woolworth Building is still around, Woolworth’s five-and-dimes aren’t.  Nonetheless, the Bronx is still up and the Battery’s still down—and the people still ride in a hole in the ground!)

Diana’s right, of course: On the Town is silly.  I don’t know if Rando and the Barrington Stage Company hoked the play up to sell it in Pittsfield (I’d never seen the musical on stage before, oddly enough, just the bowdlerized movie), but there are some obvious insertions.  (This production has a racially mixed cast, but that turns out not to be a 21st-century innovation: the 1944 Broadway staging included African-American performers and Ivy was played by Japanese-American dancer Sono Osato.)  Director Rando indulged the urge to tweak the script and score with “additional material” supplied by playwrights Robert Cary and Jonathan Tolins which sometimes calls attention to itself.  A running gag throughout the show, for example, is the same two women (Flossie and her Friend)—in the subway, on the street, in an elevator—whom we overhear in mid-conversation.  Flossie’s obviously having an affair with her boss, Mr. Godolphin.  At Carnegie Hall, we see two men entering one of the rehearsal rooms—and they’re having the same conversation about Mr. Godolphin, clearly a bit of re-casting for the present day that’s not likely to have occurred in 1944.  But, as I’ve admitted many times on ROT, I have nearly no critical distance when it comes to these old-time musicals, so little of this detracted from my enjoyment. 

So there’s little point in discussing the book—it’s no more than a vehicle for the songs and performances.  It’s probably worth noting that Bernstein’s music, though substantial and lovely, produced only one iconic song, “New York, New York.”  As befits a play derived from a ballet, however, almost all the songs are dance numbers, and the execution of both the singing and the dancing, including the choreography of Joshua Bergasse, was almost universally superb.  Bergasse, best known as the choreographer for the TV series Smash (2012–2013), is also certified by the Jerome Robbins Foundation for whom he teaches the dances in another Bernstein-Robbins collaboration, West Side Story.  He seems to have set about to spiff up Robbins’s original choreography for On the Town (which only survives as fragments), drawing on the character of Robbins’s work rather than reinventing it entirely.  (I may not have seen On the Town on stage before, but I have seen Robbins’s theater work, including 1989’s Jerome Robbins’ Broadway.)  His work and that of his dancers is sprightly and acrobatics-packed (for the most part—the exception is “Imaginary Coney Island,” Chip’s dream about meeting Ivy after having lost her earlier, which is romantic and heartfelt).  Bergasse was nominated for the Best Choreography Tony and the Outstanding Choreography Drama Desk Award for 2015.

Some reviewers back in October complained that Rando’s pacing was haphazard and uneven.  I didn’t find that, and maybe over the ensuing eight months, the performance has evened out in the huge Broadway theater it now occupies (the Lyric, at 1,930 seats, is the second largest house on Broadway), acquiring its rhythm.  The director has managed to take what Ben Brantley called in the New York Times “a seemingly limp 1944 artifact,” and breathe vibrant, delightful, silly life back into it.  (Rando was a 2015 nominee for the Tony for Best Direction of a Musical.)

The six principal performers, Clyde Alves (Ozzie), Jay Armstrong Johnson (Chip), Tony Yazbeck (Gabey), Megan Fairchild (Ivy), Alysha Umphress (Hildy), and Elizabeth Stanley (Claire), each do outstanding work in the voice and footwork departments, establishing their own styles and personalities even when dancing and singing in pairs and groups.  (Johnson has a flair for physical comedy, especially visible in his wild ride in Hildy’s cab.)  They all sing wonderfully, and each actor has his or her unique delivery style, with particular emphasis on Stanley’s Claire.  (The singing is marred to an extent by the miking, which flattens everything out and makes it hard to determine where a voice on stage is coming from.  I’m sure it’s easier on the singers, but, as I’ve said before, I still wish the theater’d go back to the way they did it before amplification became the norm.)  Fairchild is a principal ballerina with the New York City Ballet, but the others are all theater and Broadway vets who here simply validate their chops as musical theater up-and-comers.  Fairchild makes an impressive début—she’s the only one of the main six who wasn’t in the BSC production and this is her first performance outside the ballet world—and she won the 2015 Theatre World Award for her role in On the Town.  Overall, and I don’t intend this as faint praise, the whole ensemble is charming and delightful, particularly in fulfilling their main purpose: delivering fun.  (Yazbeck was nominated for the 2015 Tony for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical and Stanley was a nominee for the 2015 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical.) 

Beyond these, some wonderful characterizations are salted through the production, including Jackie Hoffman’s portrayal of Maude P. Dilly, Ivy’s dipso voice teacher at Carnegie Hall (Hoffman plays a number of other old biddies, each a gem of a comic turn); Michael Rupert’s Pitkin W. Bridgework, the over-indulgent fiancé of Claire de Loone; Lucy Schmeeler, Hildy’s rheumy roommate as played by Allison Guinn; and Jess LaProtto, who plays S. Uperman (that’s right!), Hildy’s dyspeptic taxi-company boss.  These are essentially vaudeville blackout performances (lest we forget that Comden and Green started with short comedy sketches), but they’re wonderfully eccentric and perfectly presented.  (The timing by this cast is universally flawless.  If there’s laugh to be had, even a cheap one, they find it.)  I must make one special acknowledgement, to Nicholas Ward as the dock worker who sings the real opening number (before “New York, New York”), “I Feel Like I’m Not Out of Bed Yet”: his deep, rich baritone is awfully reminiscent of Paul Robson, with the same soul and heart I hear on recordings of Robson’s “Old Man River.”  A gorgeous rendition of the longing to stay home with his woman and baby in his warm bed, rather than face the pre-dawn cold and hard labor of dock work. 

The sets (Boritt), costumes (Jess Goldstein), and lighting (Jason Lyons) all add immensely to the bright fantasy that is On the Town’s New York City.  Boritt’s skeletal scenery, like the drawings in an expressionistic comic book (sorry, graphic novel), are augmented by his whimsical, flashing projections of the skyline (especially as seen from Brooklyn), looming streetscape (whizzing past as Hildy careens around the city “from Yonkers on down to the Bay” with Chip), Coney Island (the setting for that dream ballet) and Times Square (another ballet milieu), and much more.  Lit by Lyons, the stage of the Lyric can’t be mistaken for any real New York City, but the one in the fantasies of all who don’t actually live here (and some who do, I’m sure)—the one evoked by the iconic song nearly everyone thinks of in connection with the city where “no one lives on account of the pace.”  Goldstein’s costumes just as strongly suggest the different kinds of “Manhattan women” (and a few men, too) the boys meet during their one-day liberty.  And then there are those Navy whites!  I’ve always found it funny when dancers are dressed as swabbies—maybe it’s the bellbottoms that wiggle and flap or the middy blouses that ride up and the neckerchiefs that flop around—and On the Town makes terrific use of this phenomenon. 

There was lots of press on this production—including out-of-town papers like the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune—which I suppose isn’t surprising given its iconic status in the world of musical theater.  The reviews were generally on the same wavelength for the most part, although there was some disagreement about the effectiveness of Boritt’s sets as well as Rando’s directing—and about half the notices panned Jackie Hoffman’s comedy and half lauded it to the skies.  (One thing upon which everybody but one journalist agreed was the marvelous performance given by Megan Fairchild in her first speaking role and Broadway début.)  

In the New York Post, Elisabeth Vincentelli called On the Town “Leonard Bernstein’s joyous musical” and observed that “Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s book and lyrics still crackle and pop after all these decades.”  She complained, however, that since On the Town is “already written funny, . . . director John Rando’s frantic oversell can feel a little desperate.”  Further, “It’s also hard to get past Beowulf Boritt’s pedestrian, pastel-colored set and his eyesore projections, which do little to bring the ’40s to life,” said the NYP reviewer.  “But that can’t dim the glittering gem that is ‘On the Town,’ with its delirious, high-energy score, which seamlessly incorporates Tin Pan Alley, boogie woogie and even a Brecht-Weill pastiche.”  Vincentelli, however, reserved special praise for “[t]he show’s golden asset,” Megan Fairchild, who’s “graceful and strikes breathtakingly beautiful lines.”  Pronounced Vincentelli ,“The show explodes with unfettered joy every time she’s onstage.”

Declaring On the Town “a show about sex that you can take the whole family to,” the New York Times’ Ben Brantley called the production at the Lyric a “jubilant revival” and a “merry mating dance” that “feels as fresh as first sunlight.”  The Timesman went on to say, “If there’s a leer hovering over ‘On the Town,’ . . . it’s the leer of an angel.”  In his rave review of the revival, Brantley had high praise for all the actor-singer-dancers, including the supporting cast, as well as the designers, choreographer, orchestra, and director.  (Music director James Moore, conducting a 28-piece orchestra, used the original 1944 arrangements for the score.)  Characterizing On the Town as “fizzy and frisky” in the Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz said that not only do the play’s sailors “get lucky,” but “[t]he audience does, too.”  The show “feels like a big, juicy kiss,” Dziemianowicz wrote.  The director, said the Newsman, “mines the script for all its boisterous humor and smartly makes space for hushed interludes” and he also praised the entire company collectively and individually, noting, “The look of the show is chipper and bright.”  Dziemianowicz did cavil about Boritt’s set designs, describing them as “head-scratchers”: “Set pieces add modern flourishes but overdo the cartoonishness. That includes clear plastic skyscrapers and a lemon-yellow T. rex.”  “Even so,” the News review-writer concluded, “it’s a helluva entertainment.”

“When did you last see a big-budget musical that made you want to shout with joy?” asked Terry Teachout in the Wall Street Journal.  Then he announced that On the Town “is everything a great show should be,” adding that “anyone who isn’t thrilled by this tinglingly well-staged production needs a heart transplant.”  Nonetheless, Teachout admonished readers that On the Town “is far more than a piece of fancy fluff, and while John Rando, the director, is a recognized master of comic timing who could make a funeral funny, he never skimps on warmth.  Neither does his cast . . . .”  Heaping plaudits on the designers, music director, and ensemble, the WSJ reviewer instructed readers, “I urge you to see it as soon as you possibly can.”  USA Today’s Elysa Gardner warned us that the director, choreographer, and music director “have mined the show . . . for all its raw poignance, without sacrificing any of its jazzy wit or exuberant romanticism,” resulting in a show “that will leave you both exhilarated and haunted.”  “The superb cast has great fun,” reported Gardner, but admonished us, “Great musical theater doesn’t require total escapism, after all, any more than unconditional happy endings,” referring to the touchingly sad finale, “Some Other Time,” when the squids and their new-found girlfriends say goodbye shipside, knowing they may never see each other again—as the boys go off to war.

In the Financial Times, Brendan Lemon called the production a “joyous, amusing revival” in which “sailors on shore leave have never seemed so deliriously horny.”  Linda Winer of Long Island’s Newsday described this On the Town as an “altogether loving, good-humored, skimpy-looking but imaginative frolic”  that “just is a breezy, peppy, pleasantly libidinous valentine to New York-New York.”  Winer, like several other reviewers, lamented the lack of reference to the fighting of World War II (they all seem to forget that, my comment above aside, this was intended in 1944 to be escapist theater from that very concern), scolded Jackie Hoffman for “overdoing four comic cameos” (including Maude P. Dilly), complained that “the two big ballet scenes don't build into more than serviceable pastiche,” and took director Rando to task because he “doesn't delineate Gabey's two pals . . . enough.”  Winer concluded that On the Town “needs a throat-catching sense of the world outside to make it more than diverting.”

Rex Reed stated in the New York Observer, in one of the only truly negative notices, “The latest (and best) in a long line of mostly second-rate Broadway revivals . . . brings back all the songs from the original 1944 stage production . . . .  But the star wattage [of the 1949 film] stayed home . . . .”  The gifted actors, Reed added, “erase no golden memories of MGM magic.”  Complaining that Yazbeck, for all his obvious talent, is “no Gene Kelly,” Reed persisted in comparing the 2014 Broadway revival to the Bernstein-less MGM flick; even the shipmates’ three dates “couldn’t fill Vera-Ellen’s  toe shoes . . .  can’t carry Ann Miller’s tap shoes . . . [or] lacks the endearing charm and comic timing of Betty Garrett.”  (Those would be the movie’s Ivy, Claire, and Hildy.)  The Observinator went on to dub the revival “a very good summer stock production,” adding that “what it does best . . . is serve as a reminder of what a monumental job . . . the MGM geniuses . . . did . . .,” explaining, “They knew how to edit, condense and shape, achieving the kind of sizzling momentum the current (uneven) On the Town often misses.”  Reed summed up with: “You won’t be bored by all the gridlock in On the Town, but there’s so much of it!  And it’s entirely too long for its own good.”  (Oh, and Reed was the sole writer to pan Fairchild’s Miss Turnstiles, declaring that “she can’t act, and on the rare occasions when she does speak, her articulation is full of rocks.”)

In New York, Jesse Green described On the Town as “a heartbreakingly youthful work: both about youth and by youth” (Comden, Green, Bernstein, and Robbins’s average age when they created the musical was 27!); the “crowd-pleaser” revival is “as big and breakneck and beautiful as ever.”  Green complained of some “insufferable missteps” that carried over from the original to the revival, such as a “plot [that] is somewhat random” and “the effortfully silly character names” (Chip Offenblock, Claire de Loone, Pitkin W. Bridgework), but the play “triumphs over” them.  Green also affirmed that “the musical aspects of the revival . . . are first-rate,” praising both the singers and the orchestra.  He does quibble with some aspects of Boritt’s scenic design and projections, and even some of the principal acting and Rando’s insertion of “shtick” in both the songs and dances, which “begins to suggest that director John Rando does not trust the material.”  In the end, though, the man from New York urged: “If for no other reason than ‘Some Other Time’—and there really are plenty—get yourself, by warship or taxi, to On the Town.”

In the New Yorker, Robert Gottlieb used most of his review to compare the new On the Town, not to the movie (for doing which he took Rex Reed to task) but to the original 1944 première, which he says he saw when he was 14.  He spent about half his column describing his youthful experience of that surprising event, then, disparaging the reviews of Reed and Ben Brantley, who’s report made him “prepared to loathe” the revival, until “the wonderful songs started turning up, and the very capable dancing”—of which he caviled “there may be a little too much.”  The 2014 production, “a big, brassy spectacle worthy of Vegas,” Gottlieb reported, “is a lot of fun on its own terms.”  The New Yorker review-writer asserted, despite some “longueurs,” that “there are high spots” as well.  Compared to the “touch of amateurism” in the original, in the revival “there isn’t a moment of anything but slick professionalism, but there are worse crimes.”  Gottlieb concluded, “This is the ‘On the Town’ that can make it in today’s showbiz, and I’m glad that today’s audience is eating it up and restoring it to its proper place in the pantheon.”

Acknowledging that out of On the Town’s “paper-thin premise, the original collaborators spun loopy magic,” the Village Voice’s Jacob Gallagher-Ross declared, “And director John Rando’s new production delivers the goods: . . . the gushing effervescence of just-uncorked Champagne.”  “It’s a confection, but a delightful one,” Gallagher-Ross affirmed, and he advised, “Somewhere inside every jaded New Yorker, there’s an awestruck, aw-shucks sailor, still besotted by the city and crying for some shore leave.  So indulge your inner rube and take in the new revival of On the Town, an evergreen entertainment whose brash charms have not faded with time. . . .  They don’t make musicals like this anymore, and you’ll leave wishing that they did.”   

In the entertainment press, Adam Feldman of Time Out New York, delivered his “Bottom Line”: the On the Town revival is a “major production of a fairly minor work,” which he said “seems a bit like a well-mounted exhibit at some Natural History Museum of Broadway: a stuffed lark.”  The man from TONY found that, “though frisky and enjoyable” and the company does “their best to deliver a night of re-creationist recreation,” the play “does not have the strongest legs.”  In Entertainment Weekly, Thom Geier called the revival “spirited and surprisingly frank,” but sadly quipped, “The Bronx may be up, as the song goes, but the battery sometimes runs down on this production—which only occasionally hits the ebullient heights of the Empire State Building.”  Calling the On the Town revival “still a helluva show,” Marilyn Stasio said in Variety that director Rando “has given the kid-glove treatment” to the production, while Bergasse’s choreography is “classic in design and elegant in form” and “although the young and vital cast is light on acting chops, the dancing is sensational.”  Stasio, however, thought that “the show’s comic elements are much giddier than they need to be,” but “that must have seemed like the safest way to go with the show, given the limited acting range of some key players.”  “But who’s going to go to the mat on that,” the Variety reviewer added, when the “lyrics alone are enough to make any old grouch break out in a grin,” and “the sheer exuberance of the music (God bless that orchestra) gives wing to the ecstatic joy of the dance.”  David Rooney of the Hollywood Reporter dubbed the “vibrant Broadway revival” of On the Town “transporting entertainment” in which director Rando “embraces both the strengths and weaknesses.”  Rando, wrote Rooney, “is unapologetic in presenting the old-fashioned material at face value,” directing “with a mostly light touch.”  The HR review-writer ended by declaring that in this “beguiling” revival, “there’s ample pleasure on offer.” 

The cyber press came to mostly the same conclusions about this production of On the Town.  David Gordon observed on TheaterMania, “Bigger isn’t always better,” complaining that the small, human staging at BSC had grown outsized, “pushing the humor to the furthest reaches of the third balcony of this massive house.”  On the other hand, however, the TM reviewer added, “there are six central performances so exceptional that they make up for said deficiencies.”  Gordon warned, “As funny as On the Town is, it is also sneakily poignant, resting on an emotional transparency that here is only apparent in fits and starts” and “the cast members fall too often into easy laughs that are more distracting than they are funny.”  The on-line review-writer ended with, “But we should be thankful no matter what,” even though “[w]ith a little more faith in the material and a little less desire to push for laughs, Rando would have a perfectly calibrated production on his hands.”  On CurtainUp, Elyse Sommer found the Broadway revival of On the Town, like its Pittsfield predecessor, “a wonderfully performed and staged musical,” only the new incarnation is “bigger and more Broadway-ish.”  With praise for all the artists, performing, design, and directorial, of the new mounting, Sommer concluded, “For a night on the town, with unforgettable numbers like the moving ‘Lonely Town’ with its dreamy dancing you can’t beat this On the Town for old fashioned fun, glorious music and breathtaking dancing.”

New York Theatre Guide’s Casey Curtis quipped, “There is a candy store in the lobby of the Lyric Theatre.  It serves beautifully displayed and wrapped sweets.  This is exactly what you should expect inside the Lyric Theatre as well when you see ‘On The Town.’”  Curtis explained that the “show is a feast for the eyes and ears, a beautifully wrapped sweet,” but warned that “the sugar rush leads to a bit of a crash as the plot is thin as cellophane”; “nonetheless,” the NYTG reviewer concluded, “this is a high quality confection.”  Director Rando, Curtis affirmed, “impressively finds comedy at every turn”; Boritt’s designs “are delightful,” and choreographer Bergasse “stages one superb dance number after another.”  “Candy is not nutritious,” the cyber reviewer summed up, “but there is a reason we love it—it makes us feel good.  ‘On the Town’ will make you laugh and bring delight . . . .”  On Talkin’ Broadway, Matthew Murray called On the Town, “a swanked-up” revival that’s been “choreographed to a frothy fare-thee-well.”  Even though “this is hardly the best imaginable mounting of this show,” Murray felt that “it comes close enough to be worth a trip.”  Most important, the characters “have and reveal fun, which is all that On the Town really has on its mind,” which makes the play “simply put, what musical theatre should be.”  Murray found, however, that “flaws begin to creep in—not big ones, mind you, but lesser problems that, after a while, add up.”  He named the erratic direction, the production’s inconsistent energy, and the uneven cast as well as Rando’s “urge to implement minor tweaks to the script and score.”  Murray’s final assessment, though, is that “when it’s allowed to be itself, in all its glittering ’40s glory, there’s no greater show—or time machine—in town.”  Steven Suskin of the Huffington Post reported of On the Town that “this romp of a spree is cookin’ with gas” and the spirit of the four creators remains “in sparkling shape.”  Rando and Bergasse, Suskin asserted, “have precisely the right touch” and the revival “hits the jackpot” with the six principal actors.  The BSC-derived revival of On the Town, summed up Suskin, “is a dandy singing & dancing spree.” 

'The Heir Apparent'

On Friday evening, my theater companion, Diana, and I met at the Classic Stage Company’s East 13th Street home to see the New York première of David Ives’s The Heir Apparent.  I’ve seen a couple of Ives’s plays, many of which débuted at CSC (New Jerusalem, 2008; Venus in Fur, 2010) and had fundamental problems with them.  New Jerusalem, which is an attempt to dramatize the synagogue hearing that ended with the excommunication and expulsion from Amsterdam of the 17th-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, was densely philosophical and “all the talk provided for a static atmosphere,” and Venus in Fur, which I saw in a Washington, D.C., revival, was what I call a “phony drama”: “it’s ordained by the playwright, not organic to the circumstances.”  (My ROT report on Venus was posted on 11 July 2011, but the production of New Jerusalem predated this blog so I’ve posted an old report on it on 20 April.  Ives is also known for his adaptation of the Broadway première of Mark Twain’s Is He Dead? in 2007-08.)  

The Heir Apparent is Ives’s adaptation of Le Légataire universel (1708), a farce in verse by French playwright Jean-François Regnard (1655-1709).  The Heir Apparent was commissioned by the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., and first produced in 2011 under the direction of STC’s Artistic Director, Michael Kahn (who sent Ives Regnard’s play).  (There were earlier English versions of Légataire universel for the stage, first in 1769 by Thomas King, 1730–1805, the English actor, under the title Wit’s Last Stake and then again by Irish actor and dramatist Charles Macklin, 1699-1797, with the title Will and No Will.  A literal translation by English writer Richard Aldington was published as The Residuary Legatee in 1923.  Ives’s adaptation of Heir Apparent was published by Smith & Kraus in 2011.)   The CSC production, staged by John Rando, started previews on 28 March and opened on 9 April for a limited run; it was scheduled to close on 4 May but has been extended through the 11th. 

Regnard (his name’s related to the French word for fox, renard, which Ives found fitting), the son of a wealthy Paris merchant, led an adventurous youth devoted to pleasure and travel.  (In 1678, young Regnard, returning from Italy, was captured by pirates and held in Algiers until ransomed.)  Back in Paris, he took up writing largely as a leisure pursuit and his first efforts were farces for the Comédie-Italienne.  His later, more substantial works for the Comédie-Française, the House of Molière, retain the same Italianate spirit laced with recognizable echoes of his more famous predecessor.  (Influenced by Commedia dell’Arte, many of Regnard’s characters are takes on the stock figures of the Italian comedies: in The Heir Apparent, for instance, Geronte is Pantalone, Lisette is Colombina, Crispin is Harlequin, Isabella and Eraste are Innamorati, and the lawyer Scruple is a Dottore.  If you know your Commedia, you’ll spot them immediately.)  In Le Joueur (The Gambler, 1696) and Le Légataire universel, Regnard refuses to be censorious about the most callous, unsavory behavior.  No moralist, the farceur’s detached, uncomfortably frank view of a corrupt society is depicted with boundless vivacity and lively comic plotting.  

Ives described his source as “worldly, utterly honest, satirical without being condemnatory, ofttimes bawdy, sometimes scatological, now and then macabre and it craves jokes as a drunkard craves his pint.”  The playwright has called his version of Légataire a “translaptation” because, though Ives sticks pretty close to Regnard’s original story line—and the rhyming couplets—he inserts 21st-century humor and contemporary references couched in modern English.  (The New York Post’s Elisabeth Vincentelli described Ives’s process as putting the play “through his usual wash-and-spin cycle.”)  

Challenged by a woman in the audience, Peter Marks wrote his Washington Post review of Kahn’s première in rhyme, and I can’t resist quoting his synopsis of the plot:

The tale is of a tightwad who

Has never parted with a sou.

The greedy rest conspire to fill

The dole-out sections of his will.

To spell it out a little more: The rich old miser, Geronte, eternally at death’s door, is liable to seizures and violent bowel movements, courtesy of the potions Lisette, the old skinflint’s down-to-earth maid (potty jokes are rife).  Furthermore, he’s also burdened with the unwanted presence of rapacious relatives and servants who just want him to kick off after he’s written his will to their benefits.  Eraste, Geronte’s poor but handsome nephew, plots with Crispin, the young man’s crafty servant, and Lisette, to get his uncle’s money before Geronte dies so the young swain can marry Isabelle, the daughter of Madame Argante (whose name appropriately sounds like the French for ‘money’ as she’s as avaricious as Geronte is stingy).  As all this skullduggery, which involves a lot of reversals, twists, disguises, impersonations, and other tomfoolery, unfolds—or unravels, if you wish—geriatric Geronte, even as he’s shuffling off the mortal coil, spends most of his time lusting after young (and need I add beauteous?) Isabelle, greedy Eraste’s beloved.  (As may be obvious, Regnard was considered a successor to Molière.  Heir Apparent, at least in Ives’s hands, is The Miser meets The Imaginary Invalid meets The Misanthrope—with scatological humor.)  The main point of Ives’s rendition (and, I gather, Regnard’s, too) is . . . well, to populate the stage with zany, often ribald, buffoonery.  It’s just silliness made even sillier by Ives’s anachronisms and incongruities, with references to Godzilla, high colonics, Cadillacs, and soccer moms, among others.

That, of course, is the entire rationale for doing Heir Apparent, a play with no ulterior motives and nothing on its mind but good, dirty fun.  Oh, Ives inserts some comments about socialism and the 99 percent near the end—from the mouth of Madame Argante, who, it seems, was something of an anti-capitalist hippie in her youth—but it’s perfunctory and has no echoes anywhere else in the play.  (I assume Regnard didn’t try the same thing—his rep is that his plays were totally without social significance or moral judgments.  The Comédie-Italienne was closed by the king for its impolitic sentiments, but Regnard wasn’t implicated and moved over to the more prestigious Comédie-Française and greater success.)  Some of the jokes, aided by Ives’s rhyming couplets that make use of plenty of 21st-century language and references, try a bit too hard, but the second act had me tittering and guffawing pretty continuously.  (The poop jokes are so constant that a scan of Ives’s script would probably result in a complete lexicon of synonyms for shit.  Unless you want your preteens to bring the vocabulary home, you probably shouldn’t take them along to the theater for this show.  They’ll love it—you might not.)  

I hate to make a generalization on such scant evidence, but if pressed, I’d have to conclude that for me, Ives’s adaptations are better fare than his original plays.  I found both his other works forced and a little ponderous, as if in both instances Ives was showing off his erudition.  Heir Apparent, in contrast, is light and sparkling (still, with a touch of intellectuality in some of the more knowing references).  Certainly, a lot of that is due to the source material—from what I gather, Regnard’s writing is effervescent (some critics even say his verse is better than Molière’s), while Spinoza’s philosophy is notoriously dense and Masoch’s novel is . . . well, he did give his name to masochism, after all.  Of course, I’d certainly need to see (or at least read) more of Ives’s adaptations (Georges Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear, 2006; Pierre Corneille's The Liar, 2010; The School For Lies, 2011, from Molière’s The Misanthrope) before I make a final judgment, but from what I know now, this is how I feel.  

In the end, of course, a farce like both Regnard’s original and Ives’s “translaptation” depend for success on stage on the production and the performances.  John Rando and CSC have put together an absolutely fabulous rendition of The Heir Apparent.  Paxton Whitehead, Broadway and Off-Broadway veteran, makes a perfect Geronte, befuddled and constantly diarrheic, his voice a gurgle of phlegm (and I-don’t-know-what-else) throughout the first three-quarters of the play (I’m not sure I want to know how Whitehead accomplishes this), but transforming into a clear and strong baritone in the end.  Whitehead likewise morphs from moribund, geriatric Geronte into a hale and clear-headed older gentleman in the last minutes of the play. The transition, aided marvelously by David C. Woolard’s stunning costumes and Paul Huntley’s picture-perfect wigs (about which more shortly), is accomplished nearly instantaneously: Whitehead goes off stage for his costume change as the near-dead Geronte and returns in moments as the more vigorous one.  (Getting in and out of those 18th-century costumes is a challenge in itself—believe me, I’ve done it—much less doing it fast!  Several of the gags depend on quick changes, including a cross-dressing shift.)  

Possibly the most delightful surprise in an altogether excellent cast is Carson Elrod’s Crispin, the resourceful servant whom Broadway World’s Michael Dale called a “versatile clown” who leaves “no set piece unchewed.”  I don’t know Elrod’s work (he played the same part in Heir Apparent’s Washington première three years ago), but he has quite a varied résumé, from contemporary farce (Noises Off) to Absurdism (Waiting for Godot) to Shakespeare (The Tempest, Measure for Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well).  I suppose it goes without saying that he handles the period comedy and style superbly, but what clinched his performance for me was that he blends the anachronisms and incongruities that Ives clearly loves into a nearly seamless performance with the fewest possible gear shifts.  It doesn’t hurt, in addition that Elrod does a more than passable impression of Whitehead’s feeble Geronte that suggests the actor’s a pretty good mimic on top of his other acting talents.  (I wonder how he did with Floyd King’s Geronte at STC, which I assume, knowing King’s work, would have been quite different from Whitehead’s.)  As Crispin crows, not erroneously: “Well, I don’t care what anybody says, / I am a one-man Comédie-Française!”  (On Huffington Post, reviewer Fern Siegel quipped, “He speaks no more than the truth.”)  Incidentally, while Elrod’s doing Geronte, Whitehead makes a reappearance and the two identically-dressed actors perform a wonderful mirror routine reminiscent of Harpo and Groucho Marx from Duck Soup.  (Director Rondo acknowledged that the Marx Brothers comedies were “very important” influences on his “great love for comedy.”)

Another wonderful turn is offered by David Pittu as the lawyer, Scruple.  His arrival is telegraphed long before he appears so we know that he’s very short—but I’ve seen Pittu on stage before (Gabe McKinley’s CQ/CX, 2012; John Guare’s 3 Kinds of Exile, 2013) and he’s a man of perfectly ordinary stature.  When Scruple finally enters, however, he doesn’t come up any higher than everyone else’s waist!  There stands Pittu in his long, brown Louis XIV peruke, wearing a long, black attorney’s robe, his buckled shoes barely poking out from under the hem.  He’s performing the role on his knees, surely a physically difficult posture, with the character’s shoes attached to the actor’s kneecaps!  (Is this what my college theater prof used to call “suffering for your art,” I wonder?)  Well, of course, his entrance is a sight gag that elicits an immediate uproar in the house.  But Pittu’s performance is much more than just a sight gag.  He makes Scruple (in Regnard’s original, the character’s merely a notary, but what a suitably ironic name for a lawyer!) a figure of both fun and—would you believe—sympathy.  Every reference to height, even if it’s not meant to be directed to him—is taken with supreme umbrage, with ever-increasingly pained expressions and objections.  All the time, of course, we know he’s being hoodwinked by Eraste, Lisette, and Crispin (disguised as Geronte), but Scruple, in the face of nearly impossible impediments (this is where the real Geronte turns up, among other hijinks), plows ahead, doing his due diligence and taking down, as we later hear, every word Crispin-as-Geronte speaks.  The scene as a whole is riotous, but Elrod and Pittu top everyone without for a moment violating the spirit of the barely-controlled pandemonium.  (I don’t know how he accomplishes it, but Pittu doesn’t move like a man shuffling on his knees, but like one walking with very short legs.  And once again, Woolard’s costume design comes to the aid of the actor because even though Scruple’s robe has a bit of a train, it hardly seems long enough to hide what I knew had to be back there but, try as I might, I couldn’t detect: the rest of Pittu’s legs.  I know theater is magic, but the last time I was this astonished by technical achievement was back in 1985 when I saw Louise Page’s Salonika during which a dead soldier rose up from beneath a beach of actual sand with no evidence of a tunnel or a trapdoor under the stage.  Before that, I was maybe seven or eight at a production of The Wizard of Oz when, after the tornado, the lights came up on Dorothy's house with the Wicked Witch’s legs sticking out from under one side.)

The entire ensemble, as I said, is excellent, and Claire Karpen’s Lisette, Dave Quay’s Eraste, Amelia Pedlow’s Isabelle, and Suzanne Bertish’s Madame Argante are all marvelously drawn characters even as they’re recognizable types (especially if you know any Molière at all).  Karpen comes off as a bit modern, though I don’t know if that’s a deliberate choice or not, and it actually works fine in Ives’s context—what with his own anachronisms and all.  The character’s written very knowingly, which suggests that she’s meant to be a little bit country and little bit rock ’n’ roll anyway.  Quay has the appearance of someone a little long in the tooth for a young innamorato (though I don’t think the actor actually is): he’s a tad stocky and his blond hair’s receding a mite, which makes Eraste look as if he’s been waiting a long time to get Geronte’s dough so he can marry Isabelle.  This, in turn, makes Quay seem more desperate to secure his inheritance, especially when his decrepit uncle sets his sights on Eraste’s beloved.  (This also seems to render his passion for Isabelle a little perfunctory, as if he doesn’t so much love her as need her complicity to gain Geronte’s million francs—but I’m not sure this effect is intentional.)  The partnership among Eraste, Crispin, and Lisette, though clearly led by the valet, is a mini-ensemble within the greater one: they do seem to read one another’s thoughts—as demonstrated when Crispin sets up the impersonation of a distant, hog-farming niece who’s come to claim Geronte’s fortune and Eraste shows up in 18th-century French country drag snorting like a pig, followed by an identically-clad Isabelle, and finally Crispin (with the addition of a snout).  Lisette emcees the melee.

Pedlow’s Isabelle is a take on the standard ingénue, which is precisely how she’s written.  Pedlow brings a contemporary knowingness to the girl, who’s not above a little coercion or strategic whining to further her ends.  The character’s essentially the pawn of the plot—Eraste must gain Geronte’s estate in order to marry her, Geronte himself plans to marry her, Argante bargains her daughter’s hand as a way to get some of Geronte’s wealth, and so on—but Pedlow’s not averse to a little “queening” now and then to assert herself.  Madame Argante is the only part in Heir Apparent who’s not a Commedia character, though she is familiar from later comedy of manners; in 200 years, she’ll be Lady Bracknell in rhyming couplets.  Billed as a “battleax,” Bertish plays her with little sense of humor, a stern visage at all times.  (She’s also something of a mercenary Miss Havisham.)  Until the mercurial shift at the end, when we learn of her hippie-ish youth, Bertish’s Argante is all business—and her business is the acquisition of money, particularly Geronte’s.  If she can get her hands on it by marrying Isabelle to Eraste, all the better, but she’ll marry her young daughter to ancient Geronte without Isabelle’s consent if that’s what it takes.  Bertish carries herself regally (perhaps more precise to say imperiously), made even haughtier by the tall “Fontange” wig she wears and widened by her farthingale, altogether giving her Argante an out-sized and severe presence on stage.  (Isabelle’s gown hangs more softly in contrast with her mother’s hard-edged silhouette of cash-green.)  Madame Argante’s transformation in the last scene of the play is less believable than Geronte’s—he’s at least been in a trance for a scene or two—and I’d be curious to see how Regnard wrote the play’s ending, but if Bertish doesn’t solve the problems of how an elegant money-grubber reverts to a socialist-leaning Occupier (or, for that matter, how she evolved from that into what we’d seen for most of Heir Apparent), the actress at least proceeds straight ahead without a hitch, as if the transformation were perfectly natural.  The politics, as I said before, is forced here, but Bertish just ignores that and forges on with commitment.

I’ve been commenting all along now on how well Woolard’s costume design enhanced Ives’s script and Rando’s staging, even the cast’s acting.  It’s probably almost unnecessary to say any more, but I’ll sum up by declaring that the designer made really terrific use of the TDF Costume Collection and his other sources (I gather CSC didn’t build the period clothes for this show) to put together the look of the production.  I mentioned Madame Argante’s green dress (and yes, I know francs aren’t green—but the audience is American and here green means cash), but Geronte’s spiffy new outfit at the end of the play, his wedding togs, is a silver suit of tunic and breeches, not quite lamé but suggestive of that, that also recalls money (and here, the French does parallel the symbol—money in French is argent, which also means ‘silver’).  Geronte now sports a brand-new peruke, also a silver gray, of elaborate curls and ringlets as styled by wig-designer Huntley.  

In contrast with the elegance of the final costume changes, though not so much of Geronte’s earlier attire, John Lee Beatty’s set is more like a storage room for discarded period furniture than a rich man’s sitting room.  (TheaterMania’s Zachary Stewart likened the set to “a Williamsburg antique shop”—not the Brooklyn neighborhood, I suspect, but the restored colonial town in Virginia.)  The theater’s brick back wall is exposed, as if Geronte hadn’t wanted to pay for paneling, and the décor is more jumble than Neo-classical orderliness.  We know that the old skinflint has kept his very first centime (on which keep your eye, by the way), but Beatty’s made it look like he’s closer to a hoarder than a mere miser: an 18th-century Charles Foster Kane, perhaps.  The lighting, which melds the whole together successfully, is by Japhy Weideman.

Rando, who seems somewhat inarticulate in the interview published in the CSC newsletter, has coordinated all these elements admirably.  He’s worked with Ives numerous times since the 1990s (Ancient History/English Made Simple, 1996; Mere Mortals and Others, 1997; Polish Joke, 2003; All in the Timing, 2013) and on musicals, especially those presented by Encores!, where Ives, a script adapter, introduced him.  They’re obviously on the same wave-length, and it shows in the stage results.  The film comedies which Rando admires, aside from the Marx Brothers’, include Woody Allen’s and the Peter Sellers-Blake Edwards Pink Panther movies.  The truth, of course, is that not all artists can speak glibly about their own work, but since, especially in theater, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, not the describing, Rando acquits himself and serves both Ives and his cast splendidly.  Regnard and Ives created a clockwork plot, with gears within gears, all spinning in different directions, though toward the same end, and Rando keeps it all on course and in rhythm (not to forget rhyme) with a nicely light touch.  

The press was surprisingly mixed—and a little light, a number of usual outlets not having published (at least not on line).  In the New York Post, Elisabeth Vincentelli opened her notice by declaring that The Heir Apparent “strains so much to be funny, it’s exhausting—if it were a jacket, it would burst its buttons,” comparing the play unfavorably with Ives’s previous writing in The School for Lies and Venus in Fur.  Complaining that “the more-is-less nature” of the production “grows wearisome,” Vincentelli blamed Rando’s “manic” direction.  Saying that David Pittu is wasted on a “one-joke role,” Vincentelli remarked that he may need “a post-show massage”—concluding that the “audience could use one, too.”  On the other hand, the New York Times’s Charles Isherwood described the play as “boisterous, bawdy and endlessly funny,” and the production as “directed with meticulous abandon by John Rando.”  “It is indeed excessively good,” the Timesman proclaimed, and the “entire cast excels.”  In the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout characterized Ives’s play as “brilliant” and “elegantly wrought.”  The WSJ reviewer said “Ives's couplets glitter with close-packed virtuosity,” the CSC “cast is perfect, and John Rando's staging is a slapsticky riot.”  

Among the weeklies, the New Yorker reviewer wrote in “Goings On About Town,” “Ives’s baroque rhymes often delight,” and, “The director John Rando sets a giddy, hurtling pace, crashing past unlikely verse and doubtful plot points.”  In his Village Voice notice, Tom Sellar dubbed Ives’s adaptation a “comic jewel” that “brims with contemporary wit.”  Concluded Sellar, “The production, directed with exactness by John Rando, is a delight with twin pleasures: the razor-sharp wit of Ives's flowing verse and the cast's gusto.”  Entertainment Weekly’s Jason Clark averred that, having “struck gold” in his past work, Ives “merely strikes bronze” with Heir Apparent, a “madcap laffer” in which Clark wished “more of [the jokes and gestures] actually stuck.”  Clark’s complaint was that the “machine-gun ratio of jokes to spoken lines is about three to one,” but he found that “so many of them pivot to the scatological, the result becomes more wearying than cheering.”  The EW review-writer called the cast “game,” but felt that they are “a bit over directed by John Rando.”  His final word was, “The Heir Apparent strikes the same chord a bit too often.” 

In the cyber press, Fern Siegel of the Huffington Post called Ives’s version of The Heir Apparent a “madcap” and “fast-paced” “fanciful delight” that “proves loads of fun.”  Director Rando “has timed the action perfectly,” Siegel said, and “his hilarious cast is uniformly tops.”  On Broadway World, Michael Dale called Ives’s script “nimbly penned” and the CSC presentation a “rollicking production.”  The BWW writer concluded, “Bouncing back and forth between highbrow wit and lowbrow crudeness . . ., The Heir Apparent is divinely silly and a heck of a good time.”  Zachary Stewart wrote in his TheaterMania review that Heir Apparent is “an irreverent laugh fest with more than a few moments of sublime linguistic brilliance.”  The “off-the-wall ludicrous” references and the “eloquent toilet humor” help make “for a zanier experience,” TM’s Stewart said, and the cast “lean into this cartoonish reality” in a “well-choreographed lunacy” which Rando “perfectly paces.”  Concluded Stewart, “You'll leave this one with a big grin on your face.”  On CurtainUp, Elyse Sommer called Heir Apparent “an old-fashioned caper” in which “we see [Ives’s] own spirit superimposed.”  Rando directed, Sommer felt, “fast and furiously, but not too fast to land every laugh.”  The technical production is “wonderful” and Sommer graded the whole cast “A or A+.”  It all adds up to “a full-featured, enjoyable entertainment for their ticket” price, concluded Sommer.

Now, I saved one published review for last because . . . well, you’ll see.  I remarked above that Peter Marks had met a Washington theatergoer’s challenge to write his Washington Post review in verse, and when I surveyed the New York notices, lo and behold, what did I discover?  Adam Feldman of Time Out New York had done likewise.  Instead of spot-quoting his review, I’m just going to reprint it here to close my report.  Enjoy:

When rusting classics need repolished lives,

Is anyone fitter than David Ives?

He loves to dip his quill where others daren’t,

Most newly in Regnard’s The Heir Apparent.

With rhyming verse, Ives kicks out all the jams,

Pentameter agleam with bright iambs,

And happily creates for all to see

A comic marvel at the C.S.C.

The 18th-century plot—already a

Tad familiar from commedia—

Concerns young lovers, lawyers and misers

And servants who serve as their advisers.

But here the stock is flavored to a T

With vibrant comic ingenuity.

A zippy Carson Elrod heads the cast

As Crispin, crafty valet of Eraste

(Dave Quay), a callow but handsome fella.

Amelia Pedlow plays Isabella,

Who loves Eraste, but who, despite her want,

Obeys her mom: the mean Madame Argante

(Ripe Bertish), who will only have her wed

To someone with a luxury of bread.

The old Geronte (ace Whitehead) fits that bill

And so Eraste must bend his uncle’s will

To get the ancient pincher to agree

To leave him all his dough as legacy.

This summary can only just begin

To limn the joys of Ives’s loony bin.

There’s John Lee Beatty’s rich set, and—oh

Yes!—whip-quick direction by John Rando.

Go see the play and you’ll surely concur

This Heir Apparent is a farce majeure.

Okay, Feldman’s not as clever at doggerel as Ives, but, hey—it’s like the dancing bear.  It’s not how well he dances, it’s that he dances it at all!