Don’t Rain on Their Parade
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The fourth annual City Center Encores! Bash offered an object lesson in the various levels of musical theater talent working today. All the performers were at least competent and professional – nobody’s nephew or girlfriend was in the lineup – but in several cases they were significantly better than that. And one was among the greatest Broadway divas currently active. Even when the singers are merely professional, there’s always musical director Rob Fisher and that amazing Coffee Club Orchestra.
The program paid tribute to five songwriters who will be celebrating their centennials in 2005: Harold Arlen, Marc Blitzstein, Dorothy Fields, Frederick Loewe, and Jule Styne. The selections from Fields’s catalog were representative, in that they covered some of her most obscure shows, such as “Seesaw” and “Arms and the Girl,” as well as one of her most famous songs, “On the Sunny Side of the Street.”
In the latter case, someone borrowed the famous 1943 Tommy Dorsey-Sy Oliver arrangement, which would have been a brilliant idea, except that here it only proved that most Broadway vocalists can’t swing to save their souls. The other misstep was “I Wonder What Became of Me,” in which the orchestration and the idea of an authentic re-creation didn’t quite come off. The result was too formal, too operatic, and too fussy to communicate what Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s torchy number was supposed to be about.
Some of the better-than-good turns included the numbers from the Blitzstein songbook, such as the baritone-tenor duo of Burke Moses and Michael Arden on a selection from the songwriter’s highly patriotic “Airborne Symphony” (a rarely performed work from World War II). Christine Ebersole sang “A Modest Maid” from the 1956 “Littlest Revue,” playing up the contrast between her very proper contralto and the lecherous content of the lyric.
Finally, Malcolm Gets and Rebecca Luker were given two numbers from Blitzstein’s most highly regarded work, “Juno.” Just to hear two numbers from this fabled score with a full orchestra is amazing. But to hear the haunting “I Wish It So” sung by a soprano of Ms. Luker’s quality is icing on the cake. It’s part of what makes the Encores! series so charming.
The dance-oriented features nearly always stopped the show, starting with the lascivious “Welcome to the Holiday Inn” from “Seesaw” by Sara Gettelfinger and three dancing boys who made their entrance extending martini glasses from stage right. But the terpsichoric highlight was Noah Racey, a song-and-dance man who effortlessly evokes the best of the 1930s. His turn on Arlen’s “You’re a Builder-Upper” climaxed in a few steps on the grand piano itself, while Mr. Fisher and Chris Fenwick played a four-handed duet that evoked Phil Ohman and Victor Arden.
The star baritone was the robust Brent Barrett, one of the best currently working. He was featured in two manly man showcases, both by Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner. “If Ever I Would Leave You” showed that manly men can be tender and “They Call the Wind Maria” showed that manly men can be, well, manly.
Debbie Gravitte, who put over “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” displays a combination of glamour, humor, and chops that would have, in a more intelligent cultural climate, made her an above-the-title star. Like Eydie Gorme or Barbara Streisand, she can move effortlessly between Broadway and traditional pop.
The biggest laughs came, unsurprisingly, from Harvey Fierstein, who intoned the female lines from “I Remember It Well.” I expected Mr. Fierstein to go over the top, but he played it surprisingly subtle, just speaking the lines as calmly as possibly in his cigarette-y basso.
But for me the highlight of the night was Leslie Uggams, who sang “My Own Morning,” which she introduced in the 1967 “Hallelujah, Baby.” I had never paid much attention to this show before, but her performance made me think this Styne-Comden and Green effort is an overlooked gem. She was even stronger on “Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe,” from the film version of “Cabin in the Sky,” which was authentic down to Ethel Waters’s girlish squeals in the coda.
Even, apart from the orchestra, Encores! is as always a class act. The only thing I could have wished for was some acknowledgement of the death of Cy Coleman, composer of the two “Seesaw” songs. But I was thinking of him, anyway.