Word: smokey
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This week, 30 years after they chucked the teen format to write cabaret songs for the cognoscenti, these two troublemakers are On Broadway (another number they helped write). Smokey Joe's Cafe: The Songs of Leiber and Stoller is a gaudy, exuberant concert of 40 or so prime L&S tunes, directed at stock-car speed by Jerry Zaks and sold with foot-in-the-door showmanship by a cast of five guys and four gals. The evening serves as a celebration-of what L&S did and what Broadway, when it gets the spark, can still...
...Smokey Joe's Cafe is as colorful and jaunty as the Day-Glo zoot suit that comes to life and struts through the Shoppin' for Clothes number. Choreographer Joey McKneely gives the performers a killer aerobic workout. When they're not executing brisk parodies of the goofy-cool footwork done by every backup group in the '50s, they are sexily slow dancing to L&S's low-tempo stuff or, in a gorgeous version of Spanish Harlem, bringing ballet to the barrio. These cats can sing too, both as solo stunners-check out Victor Trent Cook's rabid virtuosity...
Because Zaks did not impose a story line on the song cycle, the show is always in danger of playing like an after-dinner revue on a cruise ship. But the music's wit and the cast's verve carry Smokey Joe's Cafe past easy nostalgia into knowledgeable evocation. Unlike the heavy production of Show Boat now on Broadway, this one sails and soars. It's not just a revival; when B.J. Crosby puts her capacious lung power to the gospelish Saved, the show is a revival meeting...
There is a connection, though, between the panoramic prettiness of Show Boat and the searchlight grittiness of Smokey Joe's Cafe. Whether or not they realized it, Leiber and Stoller were accomplishing in the '50s what Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein did in the '20s: translating the black music of church halls and barrooms into sophisticated songs that were at once true to the original spirit and acceptable to a mainstream audience. For L&S, that acceptability was a fluky byproduct of their urge to write rhythm and blues for the "race music" market. They didn't need to dilute...
...plumb tales of love gone sour. Even though Becker's melodies sometime seem stark and his voice is a mere bleat, his ear for catchy grooves gives Whack soulfulness and heft. Down in the Bottom, the CD's finest cut, chugs forward on a rhythm smart enough to make Smokey Robinson proud and maybe even cool enough to have made Charlie Parker feel like soloing. Don't ever expect the jazz-pop fusion of, say, Yanni to put you in mind of performers like that...