Word: broadways
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...thank Mel Brooks, of all unlikely souls - thank you, Mel Brooks - for prodding Broadway back to life in 2001 with The Producers. That staging of his 1968 movie was full-throttle farce with generically catchy songs, and it presaged the next generation of smart-silly musical comedies. Among its spawn were Hairspray and Spamalot, shows that put a post-modern twist on the antique shows of the '20s and '30s. Back then, plots were dental-floss clotheslines on which to hang a dozen chipper songs, and the audiences were meant to go out humming and smiling...
...friendly hermit known only as Man in Chair (co-author Bob Martin) slips a 33-1/3 rpm record out of its sleeve and tells us we are about to hear A 1928 musical called guess what. In a trice, the gent's apartment is converted into a Broadway stage and the musical is performed, with Man in Chair's frequent interpolations on the biographies of the stars. It's all faux, you know, and as directed by Casey Nicolaw (who choreographed Spamalot) the evening has an airy confidence worthy of the old shows...
...those songs, and the bliss they induce, you must stray off Broadway. Walk a half block down 55th Street to the invaluable City Centers Encores! series, which last night premiered its concert version of the Gershwins' 1931 hit Of Thee I Sing. Or go further northeast to one of the city's magnificent cultural resources, the 92nd Street Y, which last weekend presented "Hooray for Hollywood: Johnny Mercer at the Movies." Those are the places I was this week, in heaven. Read on, and sing along...
...show, assembled by that preeminent scholar of Broadway music, Robert Kimball, had some nice arcana, like Mercer's rejected lyric for a Harold Arlen tune that, thanks to Ira Gershwin, became "The Man That Got Away." And at the end, one of Mercer's most important interpreters came on stage: Margaret Whiting, still a pistol at 81. The night I attended, she went dry on some lyrics to "One for My Baby," then won the audience back by muttering, in her best saloon-chanteuse alto, "Of all the songs to blow, it had to be this...
...what seemed the depths of the Depression - how little they knew - the play relates the machinations of political bosses to get its man, John Wintergreen (here, Broadway veteran Victor Garber), into the White House. Bereft of ideas or ideals, they take the advice of a chambermaid and run on a platform of Love. Their scheme is to stage an Atlantic City beauty contest and marry off the winner, a Southern honeypot named Diana Devereaux (wowser Jenny Powers), to the bachelor Wintergreen. The candidate, though, has fallen for his secretary, Mary Turner (Jennifer Laura Thompson, fresh from playing Glinda the Good...