It’s not easy to get On the
Town right. You have
to hook into the sensibility of the period and a performance style that evokes
it. Too many directors mistake freneticism for screwball—even generally,
not merely in On the Town—and
yet you have to preserve the sense of World War Two as a present factor. When
those three sailors sing about having “just one day” to enjoy New York while on
leave, it helps up the ante on the comedy, on the ticking clock running out on
the time that Gabey has to find Ivy, if in the back of our minds, just as a
subliminal enhancement, we’re aware that this could be the sailors’ last
24 hour leave, ever. That they may not return from duty alive.
John
Rando starts off the evening with a giant
drop of the American flag and the audience asked to rise to sing the national
anthem. In an era where terrorism can lurk around the corner, it’s reminder
enough…and then the fun begins.
After
that there are two ways you can do On the Town. You can do it as director Bill Berry did with the
production from Washington’s 5th Avenue Theatre that was imported to the Paper
Mill Playhouse a few years ago and—this is the only way I can articulate
it—just let it be what it is. Cast people who connect effortlessly with
the performance style and go for period authenticity of a sort.
The
second is to do what Rando has done. And it’s harder. Not better. Harder.
Which is to update the sensibility without making it seem like an update. Find the dated jokes, root them out, put in hipper
jokes and then create a comic playing style that’s about the era in terms of idiom and iconography, but is
also a comment on the era,
allowing for contemporary perspective, a more knowing nostalgia, if you will.
Among
the things that makes this harder is you have to keep working the tone it to keep
it alive. And you can’t overwork it,
lest you start winking at the audience such that you descend from Comden-Green-Bernstein-style
send-up to camp, and lose the heart, not to mention the funny.
If
there is a reigning comedy specialist among the new generation of musical
theatre directors, Rando is probably it, and he’s one of the few (if there are
even as many as a few) who could have pulled this off. My only carp…at times I
think he stays too long on a good thing, in the musical interludes particularly.
Judicious and merciless internal trimming would make what’s already splendid
even better, I think.
He
has, of course, abetted his triumph with excellent casting; and rather than go
through the subroutine of naming and praising the leads in the exceptional
cast, I’ll just single out personal favorites: Tony Yazbek as Gabey—brilliant in all departments,
dancing and singing and etc. but perhaps most notably in floating the
character’s sweet, gallumphy naïveté—and Alysha Umphress as “I Can Cook Too” Hildy; her bio sports enough
credits that to call her “a real find” is perhaps overstating the case, but
there’s no question that she’s turned Hildy into a breakout role; the virtual
poster girl for the sexiness of the “fuller” woman, her scat-singing alone is enough
to bring down the house. But the rest of the leads and supporting players are
just as fine.
Add
spectacular physical design (sets: Beowulf Borritt, costumes: Jess Goldstein), tech design to match and the kind of choreography
that reminds you why you’re a patriot, or should be (Joshua Bergasse) and On the Town is exactly what it
should be: a primer for future generations of theatre artisans on how revivals
ought to be handled…
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