‘Do Re Mi’
J2 Spotlight Musical Theater Company
AMT Theater
Through April 28

In 1960, when the legendary showman David Merrick produced the musical “Do Re Mi,” he did almost everything right: The great playwright Garson Kanin turned in the screwball comedy script, based on one of his own stories, and also directed; legendary songwriters Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Jule Styne delivered a toe-tapping, note-perfect score; and the cast starred two of Broadway’s all-time funniest and most beloved performers, Phil Silvers and Nancy Walker.  

The critics loved it, and rightfully so. The show ran a year, making it at least a minor success by the standards of the day; with a talented roster and a finished product like this, though, it should have been a blockbuster.

Still, “Do Re Mi,” which is being revived by the J2 Spotlight Musical Theater Company, is a delightful piece of work. The problem in 1960 was not in the show itself, it seems, but a matter of timing. “Do Re Mi” was a spoof of the popular music industry that arrived in the wake of a huge hit. “Bye Bye Birdie,” a more up-to-date spoof of the popular music industry that had opened eight months earlier, would go on to win a Tony and soon become a beloved movie.  

The “Do Re Mi” team consisted of established veterans, whereas “Birdie’s” creators and stars were all fresh and young; most were doing a Broadway musical for the first time.  Everything about “Birdie” seemed fresh and new, even the idea of parodying Elvis Presley, whereas “Do Re Mi” almost seemed like oldtimers griping about those rotten kids and their lousy music — much like Paul Lynde does in “Birdie.”  

Lastly, if “Do Re Mi” seemed like familiar territory even before it opened, it was because Kanin’s original story “Do Re Mi,” about racketeers in the music biz, had already served as the basis for a hit film, “The Girl Can’t Help It,” in 1956.

“Do Re Mi” is completely dependent on a strong pair of leads, as in the 1999 City Center Encores! Revival, with Nathan Lane and Randy Graff. The excellent J2 production, directed by Robert W. Schneider, gives us worthy successors in Ian Lowe and Rebecca Spigelman as Hubie Cram, a penny-ante hustler, and his long-suffering wife, Kay. They both have the combination of laughs and pathos needed to pull the roles off: she has an adorable face, a sweet voice, and a game attitude; he has impeccable timing, not to mention big glasses, bigger teeth, and the ability to look like a woodchuck in a cheap suit.

“Do Re Mi” was actually the third time Jules Styne had written a show for Phil Silvers. Although the first of these, the 1944 “Glad to See You” (a title derived from the comedian’s most famous catchphrase) never actually made it to Broadway, the second, the 1947 “High Button Shoes,” had been a substantial hit.  

In the canon of Comden & Green, “Do Re Mi” marked the latest installment of their run of satirical takes on the world of popular culture — following their take-off of old Hollywood in “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952), contemporary Broadway in “The Bandwagon” (1953), television in “It’s Always Fair Weather” (1955), and now pop music. Technically, they didn’t write the book for “Do Re Mi,” but it’s their kind of humor.

Hubie’s great innovation is the idea of bringing gangsters into the jukebox trade, which, by the end of the 1950s, was an idea torn from the day’s headlines; Morris Levy, founder of Roulette Records, was merely the most infamous figure in the trade who was alleged to have ties to organized crime. In fact, last season saw a kind of nonfiction version of “Do Re Mi” in “Rock & Roll Man,” an off-Broadway musical biography of Alan Freed, who, like Hubie Cram, winds up being put on trial for various kinds of music biz chicanery. Hubie gets off; Freed wasn’t so lucky.

In 1960, legendary character actor David Burns and Al Lewis (known from “The Munsters”) were two of the original hoodlums, Brains Berman and Moe Shtarker; here, the four bad boys are the very funny Eric Michael Gillett, Richard Rowan, John Leone, and Caleb Funk as a jittery hitman.  

Importantly, while “Do Re Mi” employs the two-couple narrative format established in “Oklahoma!,” in this show the main couple, Hubie and Kay, are the funny one, and the straight couple, Caitlin Belcik as Tilda and Tyler Okunski as Wheeler, are secondary.

As with “Birdie,” the score to “Do Re Mi” includes a vintage 1960 take on what rock and roll sounded like to old-school Broadway tunesmiths: “All You Need is a Quarter,” repeated throughout the score like a leitmotif, is their impression of an R&B number; “Cry Like the Wind” is a modern folk song as might have been sung by The Kingston Trio or Peter, Paul, and Mary; and “What’s New at the Zoo” is an animalistic take on three-chord Brill Building pop.

Yet also as with “Birdie,” it’s the more traditionally musical-theater songs that have endured: Styne, Comden, and Green gave us a comedic masterstroke in “The Late, Late Show” at the end of Act 1. Act 2 is framed by two ambitious soliloquies, Kay’s “Adventure” and Hubie’s “All My Life.”  

With the latter, it’s almost as if Styne took stock of what he and Stephen Sondheim achieved with “Rose’s Turn” at the end of “Gypsy” (1959) and was determined to improve upon his own work. “All My Life” is essentially “Hubie’s Turn,” especially as rendered by Mr. Lowe.

Yet the main song that has lingered in our consciousness is “Make Someone Happy,” as performed here by Mr. Okunski and Ms. Belcik; the song was subsequently immortalized by Jimmy Durante, then later by Tony Bennett and Bill Evans, among many others, and provided the key engine of the plot in “Sleepless in Seattle.”  

“Birdie” and “Do Re Mi” each end with what might today be considered a sour note: Both heroes get out of the music business. Albert becomes an English teacher and Hubie joins his wife’s father’s drycleaning plant. In those days, guys in the “biz” made money but had no one’s respect, while today’s situation is precisely the opposite.  

But until someone writes an operetta about the Blackstone acquisition of the Hipgnosis Songs Fund, “Do Re Mi” is much funnier and more tuneful than anything written for Broadway in a long time.