Tag Archives: Jule Styne

A Near-Sellout Crowd Proves “Some Like It Hot” Has Staying Power

Review: Some Like It Hot at Belk Theater

By Perry Tannenbaum

More than a decade before Cabaret, Tootsie, Victor Victoria, The Birdcage, and Kinky Boots pushed harder and harder against Hollywood’s crossdressing taboo, Billy Wilder’s SOME LIKE IT HOT smashed through in 1959. This was a deliciously adult film, and with Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis as the leads, deliriously appealing to hordes of teens who cherished the stars as their heartthrobs and hormone stirrers. Because of the sleeping cars and backstage dressing rooms tightly woven into singer Sugar Kane’s roving lifestyle, there was an extra edge of voyeurism for Marilyn to innocently exploit in close quarters.

True to its outlaw spirit, the story yanked us back to the days of Prohibition, legendary mobsters, and big band jazz – the speakeasy trinity. Any other kind of music in a musical adaptation of this comedy would be a turn-off for me. Listening to the sound of violins in the overture of Sugar, the first Broadway musical adaptation of Wilder’s screenplay, with music by Jule Styne and orchestrations by Phil Lang, my ears recoiled and my gorge rose as soon as the strings got involved with tremolos and sugary transitions.

No cocktails, please. Even Sugar drank hard liquor in the film. From a flask she stashed in her stocking.

Though many will question the liberties Matthew Lopez and Amber Ruffin take with Wilder’s storyline, they follow a more natural path with Marc Shaiman’s jazzier 2022 score than their 1972 predecessors. Predictably, as the current touring version confirms, they choose a more progressive PC path as well.

As soon as Sugar follows her boss, Sweet Sue, into the spotlight at Belk Theater, movie mavens and dilettantes will surely notice her radical Lopez/Ruffin makeover: Sugar isn’t lily white like the players in Wilder’s cast. Or dumb. Or objectified.

Now Marilyn wasn’t so dumb that she would pass up the chance to seduce a millionaire (it’s in the background checking that she faltered), but director/choreographer Casey Nicholaw has his leading lady, Leandra Ellis-Gaston, easing off a little when she presses that pedal. There are plenty of other places in this yarn where the comedy can be broadened.

The guys that Wilder’s risqué trailer called Marilyn’s “bosom buddies” get some subtler remodeling. Jerry still plays bass like Jack Lemmon, but he and bandleader Sue are now Black musicians. No less important, Tavis Kordell is going to take more readily to drag than his ‘50s counterpart, with a more profound and nuanced appreciation of womanhood than even Dustin Hoffman achieved as the more cerebral Tootsie. After a while, Jerry feels like he is Daphne, a transition that Kordell, a non-binary Raeford native and a UNC-Greensboro grad, is pleasingly at home with.

As Curtis did, Joe still blows the saxophone before and after he crossdresses, transforms into Josephine, and joins Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopators Band. But since Christian Borle was nearly 50 when he opened on Broadway in the role, the former Black Stache (Peter and the Starcatcher)and rockstar Shakespeare (Something Rotten!) was repeatedly chided for being old. So unlike the suave matinee idol of the film, when Matt Loehr whips off his blonde wig and reverts from Josephine to Joe, his hair is more salt than pepper.

Ranging further from the original, both Josephine and Daphne double their showbiz talents as an amazing tapdance duo – so the oldster has drawn a high-energy role. If Loehr is at pains to keep in step with Kordell and Ellis-Gaston, his huffing and puffing can only augment the comedy. Somewhat fiendishly, Nicholaw delights in giving all three leads a workout, even embracing the absurdity that all the Syncopators can become ace tapdancers – along with the waiters and bellmen they meet on the way.

Of course, when the tap duo is in disguise, they dance in high heels.

Momentum for the story – and the guys’ motivation to sequester themselves in drag – pushes from Chicago, where mobster Spats Columbo initially hires Jerry and Joe to perform. The production saves on scenery and props by keeping Spats’s killings indoors while arming him and his henchmen with pistols instead of machine guns. But Scott Pask’s scenery economies go too far.

Evidently, Pask never received the memo that all touring shows playing the Belk must be able to hit audiences in the eye with the production logo from a distance of 50 yards. Some Like It Hot not only lacks a logo on its faux curtain and proscenium, it’s missing any trace of color! Worse, the stage-filling motif is recycled over and over in various scenes, occasionally acquiring the hues of purple and turquoise. With the aid of smart bulbs, a quartet of chandeliers also reappears over and over during the band’s odyssey, as if they are stowaways on their voyage.

Hotel rooms, ballrooms, Spats’s office, and Osgood’s millionaire yacht are even more cheaply evoked. They do succeed in making Gregg Barnes’s costume designs look even more resplendent in relief, enhancing their Tony Award-winning aura.

Pity poor Devon Goffman as Spats – too resplendent! If the gangleader could only be more raffish and déclassé, Lopez and Ruffin might have armed him with a larger gang and Shaiman might have begrudged him a song. Goffman draws a disappointingly clean-shaven and corporate image, too seldom onstage to tighten the dramatic tension.

Nicholaw doesn’t seem to mind the void at all. Instead, he feasts on the show’s two big chases, choreographing them for their comedic flavor while evoking one of the most beloved trademarks of silent film. Ironically, we witness much of the touring Some Like It Hot as if it were a silent film because the sound at the Belk is as muffled and foggy as ever. We’d love Tarra Conner Jones as the irascible and ebullient Sweet Sue so much more if we could decipher what she’s belting so lustily. We can be thankful, too, when Ellis-Gaston gets to vamping, for her body communicates to us more completely than her larynx.

Only Edward Juvier consistently pierces through the sonic fog as the millionaire Osgood in his screwball pursuit of Daphne. Gather round him, fellow cast members, and let him preach unto ye the gospel of enunciation.

Ultimately, Lopez and Ruffin succeed in elevating the resolution between Joe and Jerry, diversifying the love match between Joe and Sugar, and crafting a more evolved relationship between Jerry and Osgood. Shaiman had the more formidable task in concocting his score, which is probably why his Some Like It Hot often feels so effortful onstage. They’re all striving so hard to create what the film so naturally was in the first place: a road musical with cherrypicked hits for Marilyn Monroe to croon, including “Runnin’ Wild,” “I Wanna Be Loved by You,” and “I’m Thru With Love.”

You can stream the original soundtrack online and judge for yourself. With a little extra diligence, you can search out Marilyn’s rare single recording of “Some Like It Hot” and see how it measures up to Shaiman’s title song, written with lyricist Scott Wittman. Pretty well, I’d say.

Second-Hand “Funny Girl” Still Delights

Review: Funny Girl at Belk Theater

By Perry Tannenbaum

For nearly 60 years, Funny Girl has been a Broadway musical in desperate need of fixing. With songs by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill like “People” and “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” there was enough musical merit for the show to stay afloat for a little while. Isobel Lennart’s book was the lead weight that threatened to capsize the 1964 score. Attempting to tell two stories, Fanny Brice’s rise to showbiz fame and her doomed romance with Nick Arnstein, Lennart botched them both.

Luckily, director Garson Kanin and production supervisor Jerome Robbins found an already-blossoming Barbra Streisand for their lead. All the show’s problems were magically solved: with Streisand’s talent and charisma, the weakly-scripted musical now had strong legs. Strong enough for there to be a Hollywood version four years later, where Lennart could sharpen her storytelling, drop some of the original Styne songs, call for a couple of new ones – including a title tune – and commandeer a couple of songs that Fanny Brice actually sang.

What a concept! Can you imagine a bio-musical written nowadays that wouldn’t package the hits that made Frankie Valli, The Temptations, Janis Joplin, Elvis, Carole King, The Supremes, or Michael Jackson famous?

So the 2022 Broadway revival of Funny Girl, now touring at Belk Theater, was really, really retro. Not only did it drop the two signature Brice songs added to the movie adaptation, “My Man” and “I’d Rather Be Blue Over You,” it also continued to shun Brice’s beloved “Second-Hand Rose,” a vaudeville hit that Streisand herself had been performing for over 50 years.

Now the eminent Harvey Fierstein was summoned to serve as a script doctor, but not to huge effect. There’s a new frame to the storyline that makes bookends of “Who Are You Now?” the song that only came late in Act 2 when Funny Girl premiered – and vanished from the 1968 film, replaced by the more affecting “My Man.”

So after all these decades when the most obvious void in Funny Girl could have been amply patched up and fixed, the show is now a curious relic, an updated replay of the vehicle that catapulted Streisand to superstardom rather than anything like an authentic homage to the fellow Brooklynite who rose to national fame and celebrity a generation earlier.

Was the goal in 2022 for Beanie Feldstein and, subsequently, Lea Michele to portray Fanny Brice? Or was the assignment to embody a youthful Barbra Streisand? Judging by the electrifying opening night performance by Katerina, I’d say director Michael Mayer’s compass is primarily pointed at Barbs, not Brice.

Even if the book still strays from the biography, we find that Brice, vaudeville, and the Ziegfeld Follies still dominate the ambiance. David Zinn’s set design, reminiscent of the old-timey Gentleman’s Guide to Murder, frames the action in an extra RKO proscenium, and Susan Hilferty’s costume designs remain devoutly old-school, whether she’s dressing Ziegfeld’s elegant chorines or she’s slumming with the kibitzers who schmooze and play poker in front of their Brooklyn tenements.

While McCrimmon belts every tune her larynx touches out of the park – and knows enough from Jewish to give her Fanny a slightly yiddishe ta’am – she doesn’t arrive with the name recognition of her Broadway counterparts. So the tour not only comes to us equipped with McCrimmon’s considerable verve and talent, we’re also favored with the presence of Melissa Manchester as Fanny’s mom, Rose Brice, a role that was juicy enough for Kay Medford to earn Tony Award and Oscar nominations back in the ‘60s.

Manchester’s poise, dignity, and zest help speed the early scenes off the runway even though we’re often grounded in Brooklyn – and the flight of “Who Taught Her Everything She Knows?” with tapdancing Eddie Ryan, formerly in Act 1, is now delayed until Act 2. Adorned with the tap choreography of Spoleto Festival favorite Ayodele Casel, Izaiah Montaque Harris as Eddie is a ray of sunshine every time the spotlight shines on him.

The other men are all top-notch. First heard as a disembodied voice of God at Fanny’s big audition, Walter Coppage’s awesome authority as Florenz Ziegfeld gradually melts upon further acquaintance to a stern, supportive, empathetic, and avuncular confidante. He remains a formidable and pragmatic Ziegfeld, one who will not partner with Arnstein in his latest get-rich scheme.

Stephen Mark Lucas has that Sky Masterson swagger about him as Nick, wicked enough to gamble and swindle for his livelihood but principled enough never to sponge off Fanny – until he does. Lucas doesn’t dance with the same robust confidence he sings with, but he executes a comical levitating move in his seduction scene with such suave insouciance that we forgive him.

Cranky, impish, and Irish, David Foley Jr. consistently delights as Tom Keeney, the two-bit revue entrepreneur who reluctantly recognizes Fanny’s talent before Ziegfeld whisks her away. Back in the neighborhood, Eileen T’Kaye and Christine Bunuan are Rose’s card-playing cronies, Mrs. Strakosh and Mrs. Meeker, T’Kaye freer to indulge in scene-stealing mischief.

Lighting designer Kevin Adams plays around with all the incandescent bulbs studding Zinn’s proscenium when music director Elaine Davidson and her 13-piece band (including seven locals) reach the climactic “Don’t Rain on My Parade” during the overture. That gives us a foreshadowing of the extravaganza awaiting us when McCrimmon will get her teeth into this scorching anthem to bring down the first act curtain. Milder eruptions accompanied “I’m the Greatest Star” with McCrimmon and Manchester and then “I Want to Be Seen With You,” the first love duet – itself a preamble to the more delicious “You Are Woman, I Am Man.”

Though the sound system wasn’t tweaked to the same perfection as MJ The Musical two weeks ago, there were no annoying glitches after one mic conked out early in Act 1. Audience enthusiasm was nearly as crazy, particularly when McCrimmon belted out her breathtaking “People.” Powerful, with plenty left in the tank.

Those footlights never did seem to come into play, but that’s showbiz. Second-hand or not, Blumenthal Performing Arts’ 2023-24 Broadway Lights Series is on a winning streak, with a pre-Broadway premiere of The Wiz waiting in the wings.

Children’s Theatre Puts a Cherry on Top of a Joyous “Peter Pan”

Review: Peter Pan

By Perry Tannenbaum

DSC01463_sized

It has been well over 100 years since Captain Hook first asked James M. Barrie’s signature protagonist, “Who and what art thou?” Hook has certainly evolved since then, shedding his antiquated diction, but so has “The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up,” as the current Children’s Theatre of Charlotte production of Peter Pan jubilantly reminds us. Peter no longer answers as Barrie prescribed, “I’m youth, I’m joy! I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg!” Ever since Jerome Robbins, Betty Comden, Adolf Green, and Jule Styne got hold of him for their musical adaptation, Peter says, “I am youth. I am joy. I am freedom!” Without any official conquest or treaty, Neverland became an American territory.

Yet it must be said that, directing the show at McColl Theatre in the ImaginOn complex, Jenny Male has turned back the clock in a couple of key respects. Like the Darling family of Londoners – Wendy, John, Michael, and their parents – Renee Welsh-Noel as Peter spoke with an unmistakable British accent. Better yet, she radiated more pure bird-broken-out-of-the-egg joy than anyone I’ve seen since Mary Martin introduced this musical ages ago. The voice is also very fine, with richer low notes than I’ve heard before from a lady Peter and only a negligible loss of power at the top. Welsh-Noel also boasts more youthful energy than Cathy Rigby, the last marquee name to tour Charlotte in the title role, with a dancer’s athleticism rather than a gymnast’s.

DSC01768_sized

Fresh new joy also radiates from Caleb Ryan Sigmon, who sashays across Neverland and his pirate ship in a silken, spangled, flaming-red greatcoat designed by Ryan Moller that skirts the borders of effeminacy without quite crossing over. Male and choreographer Mavis Scully supply Sigmon with abundant shtick to feast on, and his antics kept the kiddies in a hysterical uproar of laughter. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard more excited glee during an intermission, as if parents had discovered buried treasure in the comedy, the music, and the flying action. Sigmon excelled most notably in “Hook’s Waltz,” slightly eclipsing the éclat he and his crew had created in his previous “Tango” and “Tarantella.” After he concluded the “Waltz” once, I hoped Sigmon would get a second ending to croon. Hamming up “Mrs. Hook’s little baby boy,” he did.

Political correctness, however, has taken away Tiger Lily’s former Native American zest, short-changing Desirae Powell’s chances to shine. “Indians!” and “The Pow-Wow Polka” have gone the way of the passenger pigeon, along with the “Ugg-a-Wugg” title and much of the Styne melody from what is now “True Brothers to the End.” A percussion orgy, maybe African- or Caribbean-inspired, and a splash of Scully choreography replaced the tom-tom tattoo. Hard to say what the main sore point was here, referring to Native Americans or the treaties we made with them. Either way, despite Moller’s evocative costuming, it was difficult for Powell to sustain any traction in her severely pruned role. I’m not sure it was even kosher for her to acknowledge that she was leading a tribe. Gender may also be off limits in our hypersensitive new world: Hook’s “Mysterious Lady” has disappeared, and the first greeting from Wendy to Peter is no longer “Boy.”

The Darling children, products of the Children’s Theatre of Charlotte School of Theatre Training, were absolutely wonderful, perfect examples Male’s meticulous directing. Mary Kathryn Brown artlessly delivered the full range of Wendy – eldest sib, adventurous girl, fantasy mother and wife – with all the joy and frustration of dealing with Peter. Wearing the traditional top hat, Eli Fischer was suitably priggish as John, and Andrew Ahdieh dispatched some endearing business with a teddy bear as Michael. Of course, the boys wanted to go to Neverland – Wendy hardly needed to invite them – but of course they soon got homesick after a few adventures and asked to schlep back across the galaxy. Alison Snow-Rhinehardt presided over the sleepy opening action with a sweet Julie Andrews accent as Mrs. Darling, starting off the canonic “Tender Shepherd” lullaby with a warmth that justified her children’s affections. Snow-Rhinehardt shed her formal during her brood’s absence, transforming into one of the pirate crew, but Jeremy Shane Kinser as Mr. Darling moonlights more prominently, becoming Starkey, one of Hook’s chief henchmen.

Male’s inventive overlays are certainly open to question. She frames the action with a little girl, Wendy’s future daughter, off to the side of the stage, reading the story and ultimately stepping into it for the final scene. In the meanwhile, lights come up on her occasionally as she gets swept up in the action – it seems that she’s supplanting the role of an interpreter for the hearing impaired. And if you think the woman listed in the cast as Tinker Bell is a celesta virtuoso, guess again. After twinkling on walls, furniture, and foliage all through the story, she suddenly flies into Peter’s hideout in the corporeal form of Haley Vogel, drinking Hook’s poison to save dear Peter and dying a fairy’s death. The tableau, Tink cradled in Peter’s arms before we’re entreated to resurrect her with our clapping, is like a Pietà. Kids at the Saturday matinee were as amazed as I was – and responsive. And how about Lisa Schacher as Smee? She was so lovably servile towards Hook that I didn’t begrudge her tagging along behind the Lost Boys at the end.

DSC02046_sized

Sets by Robin Best weren’t the most eye-popping that I’ve seen at the McColl, a little humdrum in the framing London scenes but bursting with life in Neverland with a preternaturally large dragonfly painted onto the skein along with clusters of grapes larger than Hook himself. The deck of Hook’s ship was, in the same vein, a monstrously enlarged replica of the boat we first saw on John’s bed, made from a folded-up newspaper. Dreamy and odd. The idea of making Nanna, the Darlings’ dog, into a big floppy puppet was brilliant, but I’m sorry to report that Male and her design team bungled the Croc rather badly, giving us only a tail dangling over the side of that newspaper boat as the action crested. Evidently, nobody at ImaginOn has checked out the wondrous Charlotte Ballet production of Peter Pan and discovered just how hilarious a costumed Croc can be.

But it would be foolish to assert that Children’s Theatre didn’t know what they were doing in this spectacular season opener. Clocking in at 140 minutes, Peter Pan surely ranks among the longest shows ever staged at the McColl Theatre, its opening act longer than most of the shows the company produces. Maybe the cagiest – and subtly effective – thing Male does is in the careful placement of her intermission. Flouting the norm, she doesn’t bring down the curtain on a rousing climax. Instead, we adjourn at the moment when Peter and Tiger Lily shake hands after saving each other from the pirates. When the lights came up, everybody in the audience – children of all ages – knew that there was more to come and that it would be good. The flying by Peter, Wendy, her sibs, and the surprising Tink is delightful throughout, but the curtain call sends Peter out over the audience, an artful cherry on top.