Word: misbehavin
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...truth, not much that is funky survives the onslaught of feathers and sequins. During I Can't Give You Anything but Love, a song about poverty, the stage is aswirl with what looks like gold and diamonds. The title number, which was wrenchingly performed this season in Ain't Misbehavin', is used here to bring on a choral stomp. Almost perversely, the blues, an art rooted in specific American history, is methodically detached from its context, as if the past were so much soil to be brushed from the roots of an ornamental shrub destined for transplant...
...MISBEHAVIN'. The joint is jumpin', again: the jubilant Fats Waller songbook that won three 1978 Tony Awards returns to Broadway with the original cast...
...never easy to compete with the memory of a legend, yet the revivers of Ain't Misbehavin' have set themselves that task twice over. Not only do they seek to match the exuberant spirit of Pianist-Songwriter Thomas Wright ("Fats") Waller, whose 1920s and '30s Harlem jazz inspired the pell-mell 31-tune revue, but they also contend with the joyous memory of the 1978 debut staging, which won the Tony Award for Best Musical, made a star of Nell Carter, and ran almost four years before becoming an Emmy-winning NBC special. Of course, the producers of this daring...
...success of Ain't Misbehavin' (and, more modestly, of Side by Side by Sondheim a season before) prompted a string of songbook shows. None has matched the verve or style of Ain't Misbehavin', and none has come close to the rowdy, raunchy yet infectious humor of its songs. Waller's connection with them varies from authorship to merely having recorded them, but they coherently reflect his view of life as meant for play and pleasure...
Sexier than Oh! Calcutta! and more emotional than A Chorus Line, each of which claims to be Broadway's longest-running show ever -- plus richer in social history and sheer fun -- Ain't Misbehavin' deserves a place alongside them into eternity...