Word: nite
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...Nite Club Confidentialis a small, buoyant musical that proudly, nay, triumphantly takes its place at the breaking crest of the retroculture. It is a two-hour-long tribute to a vanished time that may never have existed, packed with period songs and pseudo-period original music, as well as more Fifties inconography than you can shake a De Soto tail...
...decade. Along with some terrific renditions of a few standards, like "That Old Black magic" and "Goody-Goody," writer-director Dennis Deal has, along with Albert Evans, come up with an array of new songs that lyrically and musically conjure up the period, beginning with the opening number, "Nite-Club...
...Hollywood, as Buck and his singing group, the High Hopes, don spangled over-alls for "Put the Blame on Mamie (She Painted the White House Pink)" from the smash film that should've been, The Mamie Eisenhower Story.But the show never strays too far from its home, the nite-club, where "Song-stylists" moan torch songs and members of a capella groups strive, in the true spirit of the age, to be utterly indistinguishable from each other...
...although not able to change every scene, is equally inventive. In addition to the lacquered, stepped "nite-club" stage, it features a side area covered by a huge venetian blind, which any self-respecting femme-fatale would give her feather boa to be seen through, holding a smoking revolver in her arm-length velvet glove. Aided by Greg Sullivan's lighting, director Deal stages images that always seem eerily appropriate, as if we all carried around the Judy Garland version of A Star is Born like a race-memory...
...still treats its adult subjects with a childish joy, playing with baubles of memory like brightly colored toys. One might be left with an unsatisfied desire to know more about the denizens of the Fifties--our parents and teachers--than just their taste in clothing. To be fair, Nite Club confidential never pretends to be more than what it is, an affectionate and gently satirical tribute to a style of music and musical culture. As a musical revue, it's a success, supported by excellent performances and witty and inventive staging. But still, one wishes that American culture would stop...