Word: berlin
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Vincent, the Nigerian narrator of Segun Afolabi's impressive new novel, Goodbye Lucille, has left London and his girlfriend for 1985 Berlin. Working as a photographer, he spends his free time there getting drunk with his friends: Clariss, a transsexual ex-marine turned escort girl; B, a Cameroonian working in removals; and Tunde, a Nigerian playboy who selects girlfriends largely on the basis of their breast size. They are all in exile of a kind. Ari, Vincent's Kurdish neighbor, has been driven to paranoia by the violence he has witnessed. His friend Ezmir kills himself after "an interview with...
...Chamberlin is one of the stars of Stairway to Paradise, and so is Berlin; he has six songs in this pastiche of revue numbers from the first years of the 20th century through New Faces of 1952. There are more than 30 tunes, some more familiar than others, and two comedy sketches - the first (the 1923 "The Yellow Peril") a one-gag item in which goldenrod flowers on the stage make all the actors sneezes they speak, the other (the 1949 "Gorilla Girl") about a jungle movie with very dumb starlet and a very smart gorilla. Both sketches...
...mostly chronological rendition of the songs, a theme does emerge: of social change in America, from before the First World War to after the Second. Along with the love songs and star turns, Stairway has Depression dirges ("Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime"), war anthems (Berlin's, of course) and songs of social significance. But glamour drove the old Ziegfeld revues, and glamour at Encores! is not skin but star quality. The star here is Kristen Chenoweth, that petite package of pyrotechnics who has wowed Broadway in Wicked and, this season, in The Apple Tree (a production that originated...
...Rodgers and Hart's"Manhattan," Dietz and Schwartz' "Dancing in the Dark," Cole Porter's "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye" - I found a few surprises: the 1952 "Guess Who I Saw Today," a quietly devastating ballad of Cheever-like yearning and betrayal, and "Pack Up Your Sins," a Berlin number that was new to me, and wittier than the songs of his I know from this period (1922). Just reading some of the lyrics, you can feel the rhythm and the revelry: "Pack up your sins and go to the Devil in Hades. / You'll meet the the finest...
...show that gathers its material from 50 years of Broadway revues is open to debates about what was left out. And since the Q. in Critic is for Quibble, here are a few. Berlin, with those six (terrific) songs, and Harold Rome, with three (lesser) ones, might be overrepresented in a show meant to be panoramic. The two sketches are amusing, and give the stars a chance to mewl and mug becomingly; but, from the same book (The Greatest Revue Sketches) that Viertel & Co. dipped into, I'd have chosen George S. Kaufman's brief, devastating "If Men Played Cards...