nytheatre Archive
2001-02 Theatre Season Reviews

A return visit to Madison Square Garden's A Christmas Carol this year did not disappoint: from the busker-lined trail into the theatre--filled with Victorian carolers, displays of souvenirs, vendors selling popcorn in shiny top hats, and even the occasional London policeman to show your tickets to and ask directions--to the final bows, when Tim Curry as Scrooge, Tiny Tim aloft on his shoulders, mouths "Merry Christmas" to the audience, you're in for a jolly, festive time. If this isn't part of your New York holiday tradition, this could be the time to make it so.

This Christmas Carol is a ninety minute, slightly glossy spectacle: a most secular retelling of the famous story by Charles Dickens, abetted by effects that are often genuinely smashing and almost always appreciated by the small fry in attendance. The ghosts offer a potpourri of variety performance, starting with Paul Kandel's Beetlejuice-ish Jacob Marley, leading a chorus of ex-misers in the witty number "Link by Link." The merriment continues with the boyish tenor Ghost of Christmas Past (Martin Moran), taking Scrooge on a magical tour of his early days, including the delightfully show-stopping "Fezziwig's Annual Christmas Ball." Next, Gerry McIntyre impersonates the St. Nicholas-like Ghost of Christmas Present, tantalizing Scrooge with a Rockettes-like chorus line of holiday goodies in the crowd-pleasing "Abundance and Charity." And finally, the spectral Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Be (Catherine Batcheller) completes Scrooge's education about the meaning of Christmas with a mini-ballet culminating in his glimpse at his own sad and untimely death.

All of the musical numbers, choreographed by Susan Stroman, are filled with energy and high spirits. Just as dazzling are the luxurious sets by Tony Walton, which literally spill off the humongous stage into the audience; vibrant brightly-colored costumes by William Ivey Long; and lovely eye-filling projections by Wendall K. Harrington. Lighting by experts Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer and sound by Tony Meola complete the package, which also includes an unforgettable snowstorm (I'm not sure who's responsible for that) and climaxes with Scrooge leading the players into the audience to give out candy to as many kids as they can get to.

Tim Curry is the inspired choice to play Scrooge this year. On stage for virtually the entire show, Curry makes Ebenezer into a captivatingly irascible old rascal. Offering solid support in smaller roles are Broadway veterans Robert Westenberg (nephew Fred), Michael J. Farina (Fezziwig), and Joan Barber (Scrooge's mother and the Blind Hag). The late Mike Ockrent's slick, fast-paced staging is recreated with care. Ockrent and Lynn Ahrens' blithe book, and Ahrens and Alan Menken's upbeat score, affirm Dickens' basic message of charity and goodwill without getting too specifically religious or high-minded. You'll be humming the show's oft-sung anthem "God Bless Us Everyone" as you head out of the theatre, your arms full of programs, popcorn, souvenirs, and your heart--well--just full.

Happy holidays.

Does the word "operetta" makes you cringe, bringing up images of Jeannette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy shrilly singing "When I'm calling you-ooo-oo-ooo.."? If so, then you need to see Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life..., the new musical revue at Theater Ten Ten, immediately: this delightful, elegant celebration of the music of Herbert, Romberg, Lehar, Strauss, and others is just the thing to cancel out memories of those tired, turgid MGM epics.

And of course if you're an operetta buff, there will be much to delight in here, too. Director Judith Jarosz and Musical Director/Arranger Allan Greene have made smart, sometimes esoteric selections in creating this vivacious, melodious tribute to what was once—and for quite a long time—the most popular kind of musical theatre in America and abroad. Six talented, engaging singers—tenor Matt Castle, baritone Greg Horton, bass-baritone Philip Cowlishaw, sopranos Andrea Rae and Jennifer Hope Wills, and mezzo soprano Marianne Martin—perform some two dozen songs from fourteen different shows from the first decades of the 20th century. Accompanying them are a small but excellent orchestra consisting of Greene (keyboard), Juliana Boehm (violin), Anne-Marie Tranchida (violocello), and Harry Hassell (reeds).

Among the familiar favorites you will hear in Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life... are "Toyland," "Softly, As In a Morning Sunrise," "The Merry Widow Waltz," and, obviously, the title tune; some songs you may not recognize at all, but will be delighted by, include "Pork and Lots of Sauerkraut," a frothy novelty by Johann Strauss, "Floretta," another comic number, from Victor Herbert's Babes in Toyland, and the charming "Art is Calling Me," from The Enchantress (also by Herbert).  For me, a real treat  was to hear songs I've read about and heard of but have never seen performed: "Sally" from the Jerome Kern show of the same name, for example, and "Will You Remember" from Maytime. These are as much a part of our theatre heritage as the more-frequently revived works of Gilbert & Sullivan or Rodgers & Hart; perhaps Theater Ten Ten can help start a renaissance for this neglected genre.

Jarosz and choreographer Don Bill keep things light and lively throughout; the artists on stage and in the orchestra never fail to do the glorious melodies justice. Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life... is a treat for the ears and the heart. And, for the still-skeptical among you, I absolutely promise that you won't be bored!

Christmas with the Crawfords is a happy, campy holiday drag musical comedy in which a slew of '40s pop culture icons sing Christmas carols and speak recycled movie dialogue in eccentric but deliciously entertaining celebration of the season. The premise is that Joan Crawford, recently fired from MGM and lobbying desperately to get Mildred Pierce at Warner Bros., has persuaded powerful gossip columnist Hedda Hopper to do a live radio broadcast from Crawford's Brentwood mansion on Christmas Eve, 1944. Crawford hopes to put her best foot forward by showing off her children Christina and Christopher and winning back the hearts of wayward fans across the country.

Some of this actually happened, I think, but not like this. Taking their cue from Mommie Dearest, Richard Winchester (creator) and Wayne Buidens and Mark Sargent (playwrights) give us the Joan From Hell that we've come to know and love, terrorizing her kids, bossing around the help, and being generally grasping and unpleasant to everyone else. Meanwhile, the broadcast goes awry as an unlikely batch of movie stars keep showing up at the Crawford house–all looking for Gary Cooper's house–and interrupting.

This is a fairly brilliant conceit: the Mommie Dearest stuff wears thin quickly, but not when it's broken up, masterfully, by what amounts to a diva convention, featuring the likes of Judy Garland, Ethel Merman, Gloria Swanson, Katharine Hepburn, Mae West, Shirley Temple, Carmen Miranda and the Andrews Sisters. (Bette Davis turns up too–of course–but I won't tell you where.) Each visitor gets to do at least one holiday-flavored musical number (e.g., Carmen Miranda sings "Feliz Navidad") and also to best poor Joan with suitable banter, culled mostly from famous movies. (Hepburn quotes "herself" in The Lion in Winter, Stage Door, On Golden Pond, and, I'm sure, several others.)

Well, it's a feast for fans–and I don't want to give too much more away, because a good deal of the fun comes from being surprised by the over-the-top nonsense that each of these leading ladies is given to do. It's disarmingly innocent: Christmas with the Crawfords is pretty much a family show, actually, especially if your family consists of diehard movie buffs who remember every line of dialogue from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and know why the spectacle of the Andrews Sisters singing three-part harmony to "The Dreidel Song" is funny.

Drag star Joey Arias plays Crawford and he's good (especially around the shoulders); but the real star of this show is Chris March, who has created outrageous costumes and hats for the drag artists who comprise the ensemble. Hedda Hopper and Carmen Miranda's hats are literally out of this world; costumes for Swanson and Shirley Temple (which March gets to wear himself) are unforgettable. And whoever had the brilliant idea to put about eight inches of eye shadow on Mark Sargent's Ethel Merman caricature absolutely knew what he or she was doing.

Each of the cast members has at least one moment to shine. My favorites are Trauma Flintstone's maniacally bouncy Patty Andrews, Sargent's pumped-up Merman, and Brant Kaiwi's dead-on Carmen Miranda. The show is stolen, nevertheless, by the one female impersonator who is biologically actually female, an extraordinary young woman named Connie Champagne who channels Judy Garland with eerie precision. She sings smashingly, and she has the Garland mannerisms down pat; when she exits, just a wee bit unsteadily, quoting snippets of Wizard of Oz dialogue, she earns a deserved and sustained ovation.

Certainly no other holiday show in town can boast the roster of stars that Christmas with the Crawfords delivers. Ditto the lineup of seasonal favorites: they're all here, from "Silent Night" to "Jingle Bells" to "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" to "White Christmas." Although, maybe not exactly the way you've heard them done before...

Anyway, it adds up to a high-spirited frolic that will please its target audience and, I think, win over lots of other folks who wouldn't expect to be won over. Give Christmas with the Crawfords a try, if you're game. But remember: no wire hangers.

In any review of a Richard Maxwell play, it becomes necessary at some point to describe to the reader the experience of taking in a Maxwell play.  For indeed, one does not merely see Maxwell’s work.  Often, one does not enjoy Maxwell’s work, either, but this is beside the point.  His plays are made to be tolerated, understood–in some cases, withstood.  His characters speak in a detached, semi-distracted manner, nothing like the so-called “natural” tones we’re used to hearing onstage.  Of course, this is exactly Maxwell’s M.O.:  to call attention to the emotional gulfs that open up between human beings when we cease to communicate.  What at first seems off-putting eventually becomes gripping, as indifference gives way to naked emotion.  The feeling’s there; you just have to look for it.

In his latest work, the occasionally moving, intermittently hilarious Drummer Wanted, Maxwell takes two characters, a son and a mother, and unravels a tale that on any other stage would seem perfunctory, almost laughable, in its simplicity.  Again, this is part of the plan.  Maxwell’s stories are stories of everyday life; it’s what’s between the lines, so to speak, that matters.  In the case of 29 year-old Frank (Pete Simpson), a drummer whose career is going nowhere, a broken leg has forced him to spend time at home with his doting Mother (Ellen LeCompte).  Frank’s down time prompts some serious soul-searching; while waiting for his leg to heal, he and his mother confront the tenuous nature of their friendship, and ponder the insurance money to which, should he press for it, Frank could be entitled.

That’s really about it for the plot.  As in many of the plays in Maxwell’s oeuvre, characters placed in basic situations must come to terms with basic conflicts.  By divorcing his characters from the emotions they might be feeling in any particular moment, however, Maxwell also seems to be prompting audiences to take a step back.  Like Brecht, he’s not after realism–even when the characters burst into song, as Frank and his mother do throughout the play, the lyrics are mainly expositional.  The melodies are pleasant enough, but with the songs delivered in the same disaffected style as the dialogue, they’re as baldly revealing as the faux-wood-grain paneling that encases the playing area.

As Frank, decked out in leather jacket, black T-shirt, and jeans, Simpson is the very image of suburban angst, a kid in an adult’s body prone to Tourette’s-like outbursts and fits of frenzied drumming. As his Mother, LeCompte is a perfectly composed, red-cardigan-clad Stepford wife, reading glasses hanging loosely about her neck, ever ready to counter Frank’s childish behavior with a single, damning utterance.

Somewhere in here is a story about fear of abandonment, and the courage to transcend our limitations.  Without clear scene changes, the hour-long play’s precise time frame is up for grabs.  Its through-line is marked by specific actions; for instance, when Frank removes his leg brace, we know he’s healed.  Frank’s deteriorating relationship with his Mother can be tracked through their continued attempts to collaborate on a song–he on drums, she on the piano.  That this collaboration never really gels is but one of many sad truths explored in Drummer Wanted, a play that speaks volumes without really seeming to say much at all.

Maxwell’s work may always be an acquired taste, a meal to be savored more than devoured, but there’s no denying his fierce, iconoclastic talent, or his uniquely American vision.  His world may be a nice place to visit, but as the saying goes, you really, really wouldn’t want to live there.

Emma and Company emerges as the summer's most delightful surprise thus far. This modest, unabashedly old-fashioned musical comedy is a delightful charmer of a show, featuring an intelligent and well-crafted book, a tuneful and spirited score, expert direction and choreography, and a host of appealing, enthusiastic performances. It offers happy assurance that the lost American art of musical comedy may not be lost after all; a savvy producer could have a sizable hit on his or her hands by giving Emma and Company the production values (and budget) that it deserves. It's certainly the nicest original American musical comedy I've seen in a very long time, and it's ideal entertainment for the entire family.

Based on stories by Edna Ferber (Show Boat, Giant), Emma and Company tells the story of Emma McChesney, a divorced woman who works as a traveling salesperson for The Featherloom Petticoat Company. During the show, which is set in the years 1910 and 1911, Emma finds herself confronting a number of challenges. First, there's Ed Meyers, a rival petticoat drummer who sets out to thwart Emma by hinting to her boss that she is dispensing sexual favors to win sales from clients. Next, there's Emma's son Jock, just graduated from an Ivy League college and now planning to spend his summer on vacation while waiting for a "suitable" offer from a prestigious firm. Meanwhile, changing styles in ladies' fashion are rendering petticoats less and less popular, causing Emma's (and Featherloom's) profits to drop substantially.

Finally, Emma is dealing with her conflicting feelings for her new boss, T.A. Buck, Jr. They meet initially on the road, where Buck has gone to check out Meyers's malicious innuendo. He is immediately smitten, but Emma wants to keep her distance, obeying a long-standing rule never to mix business with personal affairs. But the attraction between the two is palpable and undeniable; will she be able to resist her impulses? And how will she maintain her independence as a businesswoman if she marries the boss?

Happily, these questions are tidily resolved by the time the curtain descends on Emma and Company, as are all of the other challenges faced by our heroine and her friends and family. Ferber's strong narrative hand provides a sturdy framework for the show, which has been masterfully written by librettist Judy Freed and composer/lyricist Jon Steinhagen. Freed and Steinhagen demonstrate an intuitive knack for crafting a musical comedy; the structure of Emma and Company is virtually flawless as far as I can tell, with a neat balance of book scenes and entertaining, integrated, well-motivated musical numbers. Steinhagen's score is a particular delight, featuring strong character songs like Emma's "Start With a Brand New Hat"; amusing interludes like "How Do You Resist Him?," in which Emma and one of her customers compare notes about the attractive new company president; and superb book numbers that carry the story forward skillfully, such as the humorous "This Fine Old Firm" which charts the rising (and falling) fortunes of Featherloom as seen by a quartet of the firm's employees.

Indeed, Freed and Steinhagen have done their jobs so well that we long for a production of Emma and Company that will show it to proper advantage: it's just not possible on an off-off-Broadway budget to do this show justice. That said, the producers and craftspeople responsible for this show have done an extraordinary job: Emma and Company is as polished and professional a work of musical theatre as anything playing on Broadway. The cast is exemplary, especially Jennifer Little as Emma, making our heroine eminently sensible, likable, and admirable--not as easy as you might think: Emma could easily come across as a prig, or a repressed, lovelorn spinster, but in Little's capable hands, she never does. Tom Zindle is delightful as Buck, and Paul J. Malumphy is good-naturedly villainous as Ed Meyers. Tauren Hagans, Jim Gaddis, Mark Mindicino, and Elaine St. George are invaluable as the chorus of Featherloom employees (among other roles). Kudos to director Kevin P. Hale for helming the show with such panache and skill.

Emma and Company is in terrific shape; the producer who picks it up has very little work to do to ready it for Broadway, which is where it belongs. (Suggestion: add a fashion show production number near the top of the second act.) If Emma and Company had been written forty or fifty years ago by Adler and Ross or Schwartz and Fields--and it could have been, it's that well-put-together--it would be enjoying a big budget revival right about now. Audiences love shows like this: witness the recent success of Kiss Me, Kate and Annie Get Your Gun and Damn Yankees. Emma and Company is a spanking new and very worthy successor to those landmarks of musical comedy's golden age.

Ignoring the occasional brief breaks between editions, Forbidden Broadway is New York's longest running musical—a venerable twenty years old now, a fact commemorated in its latest edition, aptly titled Forbidden Broadway 20th Anniversary Celebration. In addition to the expected spoofs of the current crop of musicals lighting up the Great White Way, some old favorites from years past have been revived. The result is a rather nostalgia-laden Forbidden Broadway, more bittersweet and more barbed than usual. Gerard Alessandrini, creator/writer/co-director of these perennial parodies, is not happy with the state of musical theatre in 2002.

Who can blame him? Look at this season's crop of new musicals: Urinetown, Thou Shalt Not, Sweet Smell of Success, Mamma Mia!, Thoroughly Modern Millie--not much to inspire even the most gifted satirist here. Alessandrini offers digs at the ever-increasing vulgarity quotient on Broadway in a take-off on Gypsy's burlesque trio "You Gotta Have a Gimmick," here retitled "You Gotta Be Disgusting" and sung by Urinetown's lavatory warden, The Producers' gay Hitler, and one of The Full Monty's strippers. Honest-to-God stars from Broadway's heyday weigh in on other recent hits: Ethel Merman bullies Elton John into singing "An Old Fashioned Show Tune"; Julie Andrews disses a certain Abba musical as "A Spoonful of Crap"; even Barbara Cook notes, in passing (to the tune of "Ice Cream" from She Loves Me) "Did you see Sweet Smell?/Was that a sweet smell?"

Elsewhere we're treated to a joint appearance by Elaine Stritch and Bea Arthur, singing a pithy Alessandrini lyric to "Bosom Buddies" that gives these two deadpan deep-voiced divas plenty of room to strut their stuff. Kathleen Turner sings about her new Broadway show The Graduate in a spoof of "Mrs. Robinson." Liza ("I'm getting married for the fourth time") Minnelli introduces a skit about The Producers, while the late Maurice Chevalier introduces a revamped version of the long-running Les Miz parody. Other old favorites include classic takeoffs on Chicago ("Long as you move like oiled machinery/They'll never spot we got no scenery"), The Lion King ("Can you feel the pain tonight?" warbled by actors wearing neck braces), Annie, Into the Woods and Beauty and the Beast.

As always, the pungent lyrics are matched by Alvin Colt's pricelessly witty costumes. If you haven't seen the Disney collage that he has created for The Lion King's "Rafreeki," you get another chance here: it's funnier than anything in The Producers, all by itself. The company includes three Forbidden Broadway vets—Donna English, Michael West, and Kristin Zbornik—plus talented newcomer Daniel Reichard. All have ample opportunity to shine: English as the so-proper Andrews and beautifully note-perfect as Cook; Reichard as an overindulgent Mandy Patinkin and an overtaxed Jean Valjean; Zbornik as an over-aged Annie and an overmedicated Liza; and West, gamely impersonating everyone from Mel Brooks to Bea Arthur.

If you've been to Forbidden Broadway before, you may notice that the show's normal ending—a hopeful salute to musicals yet-to-come, lately to the tune of "Climb Every Mountain" or "76 Trombones"—is absent: the current state of musical theatre, it appears, has left Alessandrini without the requisite optimism for such a number. Slim pickings for Broadway audiences mean slim pickings for Broadway satirists: if this keeps up, we'll have not only the Broadway we deserve, but the Forbidden Broadway we deserve. And that will really be a shame.

Girl Crazy, this season's first offering from Mel Miller's Musicals Tonight! concert stagings of unfamiliar musicals, turns out to be a crowd-pleaser. And why not? It boasts three classic Gershwin tunes--"But Not For Me," "Embraceable You," and "I Got Rhythm"--plus an engaging, talented cast and some lively direction and choreography. I found the show less compelling than previous Musicals Tonight! revivals because Girl Crazy is hardly the lost treasure that, say, Watch Your Step or even King of Hearts is: those three songs I mentioned are bona fide standards, after all, and Crazy For You, derived from much of the same material, lingers in recent memory. Those in search of the hidden history of American musical theatre will not find much here of interest.

But those in search of an entertaining evening will surely be satisfied. Girl Crazy tells the story of Danny, a young Manhattan playboy who has been sent to the remote town of Custerville, Arizona to keep an eye on his wealthy father's ranch (as well as to keep him away from the temptations of the Big City). Danny immediately falls in love with the only woman in town, spunky postmistress Molly. He also transforms his father's place into a dude ranch, featuring chorus girls and gambling. This sparks the ire of Lank, the town's resident Bad Guy. A subplot involves the misadventures of Gieber Goldfarb, the New York cabbie who brought Danny to Custerville (for a $742.30 fare), as he copes with Lank and some local Indians and makes a run for sheriff.

The story is improbable, to say the least; the book, credited to Guy Bolton and Jack McGowan, is surprisingly idiotic, in fact, a series of leaden excuses for the Boy and Girl to sing or the Chief Comic (Goldfarb) to clown. And, oh yes, there's also a character named Kate Fothergill, who shows up every so often to deliver a wisecrack or, more interestingly, to lead a rousing musical number. She has three songs altogether: "Sam and Delilah," "Boy What Love Has Done to Me," and "I Got Rhythm." Back in 1930, when Girl Crazy premiered, Kate was played by Ethel Merman, who made her career--and theatrical history--in this, her first role. Here the part is handled by Rachel Hale, who alas does not eradicate our memories of Merman. Happily, though., director Thomas Mills makes of these songs good-natured and inventive production numbers, with cute choreography that acknowledges and twits Musicals Tonight!'s shoestring philosophy with genuine wit and panache.

Michael Lluberes has the most stage time as Goldfarb, giving us a sense of a role that was written originally for Bert Lahr and then revised for Yiddish dialect comic and impressionist Willie Howard. (Lluberes even attempts, gamely,  Chevalier and Jolson impersonations.) Matthew Ellison plays Slick, who is Kate's husband but functions as Goldfarb's sidekick. Matt Seidman plays the villainous Lank. All three compensate for the lameness of the book by overdoing almost everything; I can't blame them, but they should consider toning their performances down. More successful are Perry Laylon Ojeda and Kelli Rabke, who are charming and appealing as the central couple.

It's not that Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh! isn't entertaining; it's just that it's so tepid. Conceived and written by Douglas Bernstein and Rob Krausz, and "directed and staged" by Krausz (whatever that means), this musical revue features about two dozen of the song parodies of Allen Sherman. The material is consistently amusing, but the presentation is consistently lame. There seems to be no real purpose to the thing: let's face it, Sherman wasn't exactly hip even when he was popular thirty-odd years ago; at best, today his stuff feels dated and a little bit tired.

Which is not to deny Sherman's wit or talent. Almost all of his songs are essentially one-joke affairs, but they're so well-crafted that they draw laugh after laugh as the theme gets developed with wordplay that borders on brilliance. Take "One Hippopotami," which is set to the portentous tune of "What Kind of Fool Am I?"--this is a masterful take on what was, in the mid-sixties, a ubiquitous piece of pop claptrap, here set on its ear as a nonsensical parade of awful puns about animal plurals.

Funny stuff; but now make it the centerpiece of a tedious scene depicting the first date of two college students, studying biology at the zoo: all the zip drains away. Unfortunately, this is precisely what happens over and over again in Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah!: Sherman's cannily crafted gems get lost in a mishmash plot about the lives of Barry Bockman and Sarah Jockman, a pair of nonentities defined by their trite ethnicity and little else. Bernstein and Krausz follow them from cradle to (almost) grave but they remain stuck resolutely and squarely in the mid-60s, singing about astronauts and Petula Clark and Loehmann's as if they were somehow topical.

The humor of the book is embarrassingly inferior to that of the songs, on the order of a sign that reads "Charlie and Maria Callas Senior Citizens Center." The performances are on the embarrassing side, too, particularly Jimmy Spadola's shameless mugging in a variety of roles.

I Sing! is a new musical by composer Eli Bolin, lyricist Sam Forman, and director Benjamin Salka (all three collaborated on the book). They're young and inexperienced; creating and putting up an off-Broadway musical is no small endeavor, and one wants to wish them well.

So it's disappointing to note that I Sing! is sadly derivative and depressingly shallow. Structurally and stylistically, Bolin, Forman and Salka owe a giant debt to William Finn and James Lapine's Falsettos. It's an odd model to have chosen, but it's faithfully followed here, in terms of characters (five self-involved, neurotic New Yorkers); staging (sparse, except for a few ottomans wheeled around the stage in various configurations); and songs (cool and complicated, with non-sequitur lyrics that are--alarmingly--mostly in the third person). It might work if I Sing!, like Falsettos, were actually about something (recall that the Finn musical was about dysfunctional parents trying to raise a child and coping with AIDS).

Alas, I Sing! is about five whiny twenty-somethings entangling themselves in various sexual pairings with one another. They're introduced to us in the opening number: Nicky is the upwardly-mobile WASP investment banker; Heidi is his needy and insecure Jewish girlfriend; Alan is his best friend, a nerdy Hebrew teacher secretly in love with Heidi; Pepper is a waitress and nymphomaniac; and Charlie is a rich gay party boy who (we will discover) is possibly actually straight. As you can see, the straight guys are defined by what they do and the girls and the gay guy are defined by their sex/sexuality: I Sing! sets the women's and gay rights movements back about fifty years. (It doesn't do much for the Jews: Alan actually crosses himself while reciting a Hebrew prayer and calls Heidi, at one point, a "Jappy bitch.")

Hardly people to care about, let alone spend two hours with in the theatre. My advice to Messrs. Bolin, Forman and Salka: please find something you care about before you write your next musical.

A final word to the creative team: please watch the show from seat B101 (second row of the center section, where I sat). You'll note that Ben Stanton's flashy light tower hurts your eyes about half the time, and that whole scenes are out of sight, obstructed by one of the poles at the edge of the stage.

For me, the most striking thing about the music-theatre piece In the Penal Colony is the way the contributions of each of its creators coexist on stage, distinct elements rather than a coherent whole; unified, but never blended. First, we are aware of the source material: Kafka's novella about a European visiting an unidentified island off the coast of Africa--the date given in the program is 1907--where he is invited to witness an execution. The procedure involves an exquisitely complex, diabolical apparatus called a harrow, which is lowered onto the prone body of the condemned and then, with needles, etches into the skin the name of the law that the prisoner is charged with breaking. The harrow--or at least its huge, ominous gears--is vividly rendered by set designer John Conklin and is almost certainly the first thing you will notice when you enter the theatre, looming commandingly, yet mysteriously, behind a gold-colored cloth that suggests both shroud and carnival tent.

The next thing you will become aware of is an actor lying on a cot: Jesse J. Perez, as Kafka himself, listening to (and sometimes mouthing) excerpts from the text which are broadcast over the theatre's sound system before the performance proper begins. Librettist Rudolph Wurlitzer and director JoAnne Akalaitis have placed the author inside the narrative rather than outside of it. At first it seems like the writer is trying to experience--feel--what he's describing, or creating, in this tale; later, he will stop mimicking the movements of the characters and instead only frantically record them, filling stage and scenery with his writing (I'm not sure why he does this).

Members of a string quintet filter in, dressed in period costumes; In the Penal Colony has now begun in earnest, and they start to perform the Philip Glass score. It's repetitive, perhaps even monotonous, music; and it's sometimes quite beautiful (and it's always beautifully played, at least to this untrained ear). It responds to and evokes themes that seem clearly present in Kafka's story: the desperation, the desolation, the inevitable grinding gears of mindless bureaucracy all live in what Glass has written.

At the performance I attended, Tony Boutte and Herbert Perry sang the roles of the Visitor and the Officer in charge of the execution. With Perez, Steven Rishard (as the Condemned Man), and Sterling K. Brown (as a Guard), they enact the story of In the Penal Colony. The Visitor introduces himself; the Guard drags in the Condemned Man; the Officer arrives and explains the functioning and history of the harrow to the Visitor. We learn that the prisoner knows neither what he is charged with or how he will be punished. We learn too that the use of the barbaric harrow, devised by a former Commander of obviously brutal temperament, is not supported by the current Commander; when the apparatus breaks down during the execution, the Officer drops all pretense of administering justice and instead becomes concerned solely with maintaining the status quo (i.e., continuing the traditional use of the broken machine, regardless of the implications).

So here we sit, at Classic Stage Company, watching the numbing but somehow continually arresting progress of this tale, mulling over the provocative and challenging ideas that Kafka has put forth. Yet we're also always aware of the artifice: there's a bandstand right next to the harrow, with five people on it playing Philip Glass's music. The Visitor and the Officer are clearly opera singers, and the Condemned Man and the Guard are clearly actors, performing choreographed movement that falls somewhere between modern dance and stylized ritual (some of it quite beautiful and all of it executed expertly, particularly by the startlingly graceful Rishard). And in the middle of all of it is Kafka himself, literally (his face and name dominate the stage floor) and figuratively (in the person of the actor Perez).

It might be disorienting. It's not, but at the same time it's never clear what all these elements have to do with each other. Director Akalaitis is quoted in the program notes as saying, rather disingenuously, that she doesn't understand the piece; Glass, who conceived the project, merely tells us that it's a "pocket opera." These are respected, serious artists, and so I view their work seriously and with respect; but I left In the Penal Colony feeling dissatisfied: the apparatus of theatrical collaboration seems to have broken down, and at about the same time that the harrow does in the story. Glass, Akalaitis, and Wurlitzer take us in three different directions in this piece, and I'm not convinced that any of them finally add to, or explain, or enhance my understanding of the themes that Kafka put forth in the first place. Why are we here?

(That, of course, could be the point. It's always the point. Don't you love post-modernism?) 

The lights go down; musical director David Alan Bunn, snapping his fingers, signals "one-two-three..." and the band starts to play Judd Woldin's jazzy, zesty score. The stage quickly teems with action: we're in Langston Hughes territory in the '30s, in the middle of a romantic fable called Little Ham, all about how a plucky but motley gang of Harlem denizens beat the Irish mob (and the cops) at their own game. It's a charmer of a tale, and in this fine new musical by Dan Owens, Judd Woldin, and Richard Engquist, it sings sweetly and dances fleetly. Look for this show to be around for quite a while.

A terrific, stylish opening sequence, reminiscent of the famous street ballet that begins Guys and Dolls, introduces us to our cast of characters. We meet Lucille, entrepreneur and local agent for the numbers game, and Leroy, her blustery, well-meaning husband; Larchmont, a bus driver and Clarence, a janitor, both addicted to playing the numbers; Opal, a manicurist, and Tiny Lee, her sassy boss at the beauty parlor; Sugar Lou Bird, a nightclub singer, and Jimmy, her gay dress designer and best buddy. There's also lively old Mrs. Dobson, who walks with a cane she never seems to need, and strait-laced Amanda, who deplores Lucille's establishment. And in the middle of it all is dreamweaving shoeshine boy Ham, or Hamlet Hitchcock Jones more formally, the glory-seeking, big-talking, slick-walking charmer who is the hero of our tale.

Ham has eyes for Miss Tiny, but she has no interest in a slacker like Ham, especially when he finds himself mixed up, quite unintentionally, with gangster Louie "The Nail" Mahoney. Louie has gotten the bright idea to take over the numbers racket in Harlem. Backed by his bodyguard, the aptly named Rushmore, Louie and his all-white mobsters plan to extort protection money from all of the merchants in the neighborhood. But thanks to Ham and his friends, Louie's plan is thwarted and Ham and Tiny are in each others arms at the Hello Ball by the time the curtain falls.

It's a blissful, colorful tale, and it's exceedingly well-told by Woldin, Engquist, and Owens; this is as well-crafted and polished a new musical as one could hope for. The characters are appealing and vivid, the story zips along jauntily, and the songs (arranged by Luther Henderson) are lively and melodic. Stand-outs include the terrific opening number "I'm Gonna Hit Today," a comic trio for Tiny, Jimmy, and Sugar Lou called "No," the rousing second-act opener "Angels," and the spirited finale "Say Hello to Your Feet." Leslie Dockery's dances add excitement and razzmatazz.

Unfortunately, the Hudson Guild stage is too confined to contain the show comfortably; neither set designer Edward T. Gianfrancesco nor director Eric Riley has satisfactorily solved the problem of how to make Little Ham feel fluid and smooth without turntables, curtains, or an orchestra pit. The company also seemed a bit constrained the night I saw the show; Little Ham calls for outsized personalities to carry it along, but at the performance attended, most of the cast was playing life-size but no larger. The exceptions were Kevyn Morrow, enormously watchable as Clarence; Joe Wilson, Jr., fine as the effeminate Jimmy; Joy Styles, shimmery as Opal the Manicurist; Jerry Gallagher, very funny as the massive but sensitive Rushmore; and Ben Blake, surprisingly effective in several incidental roles. I suspect, though, that with more time and--if the producers could see their way clear to move the show to a more inviting space--more room, this cast will hit its marks with more assurance.

In fact, what really needs to happen is for some savvy moneybags to move Little Ham uptown to Broadway, where it absolutely belongs. There's an effervescent, toe-tapping, smile-making, dancing-in-the-aisle hit sitting inside Little Ham, just waiting to be set free. It would sure be great if somebody made that happen.

Meanwhile, whether it moves or not, Little Ham is a joyfully exuberant gem of a show. Like its title character, this show mostly has good times on its mind. Happily, it delivers them.

Mr. President marks a new and promising career twist for Gerard Alessandrini, the clever parodist whose Forbidden Broadway series has been poking broad but gentle fun at the icons of musical theatre for the past twenty years. As he himself put it (in a pre-show speech at the performance I attended), instead of "making good shows look bad, now we're making bad shows look worse." The gimmick is to update a flop musical of the past, replacing the original book and at least some of the lyrics with new ones that have the satirical verve we've come to expect from Alessandrini: Mr. President, the last Irving Berlin musical, is the first target, or victim. It's a mite uneven, but very, very funny; thanks to Berlin's still-tuneful tunes, Alessandrini's razor-sharp cleverness, imaginative staging (by Alessandrini and John Znidarsic), and a wonderful cast, it makes for a most diverting entertainment.

The original Mr. President opened in 1962 and was about a liberal Kennedy-ish chief executive; naturally, this "politically corrected" version is about someone more contemporary, dubbed here "George Double-D Shrub."  Act One tells the story of his stealing--er, winning--the presidential election over Al Bore, from the smoke-filled Texas barbecue where Shrub's momma Barbara, General Coalhouse Power, and bigwig Dick Brainy anoint George as their nominee, to the eleventh hour Supreme Court decision and subsequent inauguration. All the stuff you expect is covered here: Clinton's philandering and Hillary's scheming, Chaney's heart condition and Florida's chads.

In an age when "Saturday Night Live" skits get repeated verbatim on late night news programs, it's impossible for all of this not to feel a little dated. But Mr. President serves it all up so wittily that it's welcome in spite of its overfamiliarity; there's some genuinely sharp satire in here as well. And although things get rather thornier in Act Two, where Alessandrini is mostly on his own, what with the events depicted not having actually taken place yet, there's still more than enough fodder for good-natured fun. Mr. President is decidedly left-leaning: Bush fans are liable to take issue with the show's portrayal of our commander-in-chief as a dyslexic bumbler under the thumb of his mother and Vice President. But public figures from both sides of the aisle take their share of hits, along with such historical figures as Richard Nixon, Eleanor Roosevelt, and even George Washington.

And because the show is written by Mr. Forbidden Broadway, the underlying sensibility is clearly more show queen than political pundit. Act Two, especially, is peppered with references obvious and obscure to everything from The Wizard of Oz to A.I. to Sunset Boulevard to the original cast album of Stephen Sondheim's Company. Barbara Shrub gets a joke that only the staunchest of Ethel Merman fans are going to get, and Florida's Secretary of State (here called Kathleen Harris) gets a show-stopping musical number called "Shakin' the Chads Away" that will elicit belly laughs only if you know Easter Parade by heart.

Mr. President's strongest asset, apart from its witty book and lyrics, is its sterling cast. Clif Thorn, a fine song-and-dance man, makes a grand George Shrub, far more appealing than the original. Michael West is a hoot as Will Fenton (read "Bill Clinton") and Al Gore, even performing a duet with himself a la Jekyll & Hyde at one point; he's also a gloriously funny Dick Nixon, shaking his jowls in time to the music. Amanda Naughton is dead-on as Shrub's wife Flora, stopping the show with a nervous breakdown-as-musical number called "First Lady of the Land." Eric Jordan Young makes the most of roles like Coalhouse Power and a TV talk show hostess called Okra Windbag. And Stuart Zagnit is masterful in what are probably the show's funniest roles, Dick Brainy and Barbara Bush. The latter declares herself, to the tune of "The Hostess With The Mostes'," "Mother of the Mother of Them All," and Zagnit makes it clear why. He's terrific.

Only Whitney Allen disappoints as Chillary, her buttoned-up demeanor suggesting Carol Brady rather than the First Lady.

Jono Mainelli is the show's spectacularly good accompanist, sparkling at the keyboard in the guise of Irving Berlin (whom he rather eerily resembles).

The evening does have one more star, the legendary costume designer Alvin Colt who, with his assistant Joe McFate and wig/hair designer Carol Sherry, creates outfits that are often at least as funny as the script. Particularly noteworthy are all of Barbara Shrub's ensembles, punctuated by the biggest fake pearl necklace in creation.

Mr. President isn't going to change your mind about politics any more than Forbidden Broadway ever changed your mind about Cats. But it's a fun addition to the franchise, and it's a splendid start for what promises to be a nifty new series of smart, sharp and stylish comic valentines to musical theatre.

In its way, Once Around the City is likable and, I suppose, well-intended. But this new musical by Robert and Willie Reale is sloppier and dopier than it's possible to forgive: though it boasts the occasional pretty song and pleasing performance, it's mostly an embarrassment to everyone concerned.

Once Around the City is set in New York City during the late '80s, the heyday of Wall Street and Donald Trump. It tells the story of a rising real estate tycoon named David who is on the verge on clinching the presidency at his firm, Brandebaine Brothers. He's engaged to the boss's daughter, and he's just one acquisition away from a Very Big Deal that will earn him a $2 million bonus. Unfortunately, the property to be acquired is owned by the Back On Your Feet Hotel, a sort of halfway house for recently homeless men run by Gwen, who is smart, pretty and spunky. David hatches a plot to cheat Gwen out of the hotel; but of course he hasn't banked on falling in love with her. Eventually, David finds his social conscience and hatches another plot that enables him to get the hotel back for Gwen, cheat his old boss out of an enormous amount of money, and--you guessed it--win the understandably recalcitrant girl of his dreams by the final fadeout.

There's nothing wrong per se with the enlightened fairy tale theme of Once Around the City; the problem is how poorly it's been executed. When I tell you that David arrives at Gwen's shelter, pretending to be homeless himself, dressed in an Armani suit, complete with expensive watch and cufflinks, you will begin to understand how idiotic the plotting is: the Reales don't seem to have even bothered to make their story plausible. A subplot involving a high-toned benefit at which real-live homeless people (the residents of Gwen's hotel) perform a musical number with David's girlfriend is as patronizing as it is grotesque; a second act plot twist, in which the same homeless guys impersonate Mafiosos, is sit-com offensive and smacks of desperation.

That homeless quintet, by the way, are played with deft charm by Peter Jay Fernandez, Patrick Garner, Joe Grifasi, Michael Magee, and Michael Mandell; and. Brandy Zarle nails David's fiancee Elizabeth. But none of these appealing performers can salvage Once Around the City. (It doesn't help that the leads are played by handsome but wooden Michael Magee and plucky but shrill Jane Bodle; or that Harry Althaus, as Elizabeth's fey, pudgy songwriter chum Nicky, and Anna Stone, Anne Toriiglieri, and Sandra Shipley, as various office/society women, have been directed to play their characters as broad, borderline offensive stereotypes.)

Adrienne Lobel's set, consisting of  rows of New York skyline drops framing office and/or hotel furniture, as needed, is exceedingly odd. The music, played by an unseen four-piece band, is pleasant but unmemorable. 

The idea behind Putnam is pretty neat: a Very Famous Celebrity—a star, in vague but obvious ways, of movies, music, and TV—finds that he is no longer able to function as a human being. He attempts suicide and lands in a hospital. One day, he is awakened from his coma by a strange woman with a thing for airplanes who quite possibly is Amelia Earhart. Soon, other presumably dead celebrities—including Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Billie Holliday, John Lennon, and Janis Joplin—turn up, bringing with them an invitation for Putnam to join them at the Diversified Talent Agency, an organization that arranges for the deaths of famous people so that they can live in peace, pursuing the artistic endeavors that they are suited for.

What's cool about this idea is, (a), it prompts some provocative (though necessarily inconclusive) musing about the nature of fame and the responsibility of artists who become famous; and, (b), it offers the playwright/director, Sharon Fogarty, and her talented company of actors, priceless opportunities for savvy pastiche of these legendary figures, here miraculously returned to life and brought together. Putnam emerges as a charming fantasia on what we think we know and would like to imagine about these iconic folk. And it's also a very satisfying fairy tale about the importance of faith and the power of love. It's delightfully entertaining.

Fogarty calls her work an "anti-musical" but Putnam feels to me very much like a gentle folk-rock musical play in the style of, say, Godspell. The book is episodic and loose (and, to be frank, a bit muddy in the middle); the score consists of comic homages to the celebrities depicted and more straightforward ballads that address the fundamental issues raised by the story. Some of the songs—especially Putnam's own signature tune (which opens and closes the show) and a rousing choral anthem about the importance of celebrity—are really quite lovely. (Unfortunately, no titles are provided in the program.)

Each dead celebrity gets at least one moment in the spotlight. Fogarty is delicious as the Monroe character, here called "Jean" (at Diversified Talent Agency, everybody is known by the middle name they were born with). Jason Grossman does a mean Presley impression as "Aaron," and Karen Christie Ward is blithely flighty (pun intended) as "Mary" (Amelia Earhart). Bobbi Owens ("Fagan"; Billie Holliday), Al Quagliata ("Winston"; John Lennon), and Linda Kobylinksi ("Lyn"; Janis Jolpin) are less precise in their characterizations but nevertheless effective. Quagliata gets terrific comic mileage, though, from a couple of cameos as a Woody Allen-like director, caught on TV mourning Putnam's apparent death. Jenni Frost is appropriately nurturing and human as the young nurse, Sadie, with whom Putnam falls in love.

Jason Alan Griffin is splendid in the title role, anchoring this fanciful journey into a place that may be the Great Beyond or may, in fact, be Ithaca, New York. Putnam is, indeed, that kind of show. The press release promises that Putnam will be back in the fall; with some tightening and strengthening of focus, it should prove entirely worthy of an extended engagement. We'll keep our eyes out for it.

Red Hot Mama, Sharon McNight's tribute to the vaudeville star Sophie Tucker, is a welcome addition to the NYC's current roster of musicals. In autobiographical vignettes and in about two dozen songs, McNight brings Tucker to life for an audience that mostly never had the chance to experience her first-hand (the famed singer-comedienne died nearly forty years ago). McNight's performance is tops, and the show itself, "recreating" a '50s-era nightclub turn at the Latin Quarter with a few backstage flashbacks comfortably worked in, is extremely entertaining and well-crafted.

Tucker's career—from beginnings in vaudeville at the turn of the last century, through the Ziegfeld Follies, musical comedy, movies, TV, and clubs—is recapitulated here, providing a basic biographical sketch of this pioneering entertainer, whose early recordings were produced by Thomas Edison (!) and who anticipated Mae West, Bette Midler and everyone in between. McNight wisely lets the songs—including a good deal of special material crafted for Tucker by her longtime collaborator Jack Yellen—fill in the details. The Tucker persona is conveyed in sassy, suggestive ditties like "I'm Living Alone (and like it)," "I Don't Want to Get Thin," and the signature number "Last of the Red Hot Mamas." The troubled romantic life that plagued the star offstage is suggested in "If Your Kisses Can't Hold the Man You Love (Then Your Tears Won't Bring Him Back)," "I Ain't Got Nobody," and, surprisingly, another signature piece, "Some of These Days."

Tucker's ability to sell a comic lyric is generously recreated in Cole Porter's "Most Gentlemen Don't Like Love" and in Yellen and Dan Dougherty's "Myron," a broad, rather risqué blues parody about an unsatisfactory lover. McNight puts these and the rest of the numbers over with real gusto and, where required, heart-tugging emotion; she's a bona fide musical comedy pro and her unmiked voice is a treat to hear.

Other songs, for the record, include standards like "After You've Gone," "Ain't She Sweet," and "The Man I Love." During McNight's costume changes, music director Louis Goldberg (in character as Tucker's accompanist Ted Shapiro) leads the audience in old-fashioned sing-a-longs that fit the spirit of the show beautifully.

Patti Whitelock has provided McNight with an appropriately showy wardrobe. The simple set by Mary Houston, depicting a couple of dressing rooms plus the Latin Quarter stage, is effective, as is Mary Jo Dondlinger's lighting.

The battle of the no-holds-barred, nothing-is-sacred musicals continues here in New York City with the opening of Reefer Madness at the Variety Arts Theatre. Adapted from the 1936 propaganda film of the same name, it shares Batboy’s campiness, and Urinetown’s tastelessness, while topping both shows in each of those categories. It’s also much looser, and not quite as polished as either of those two shows, but it’s still a knockout, nonetheless.

Reefer Madness employs the ol’ play-within-a-play framing device. A nameless Lecturer (Gregg Edelman) addresses a high school auditorium full of students (the audience) about the evils of “mari-hu-ana.” To emphasize his point, he presents a play called "Reefer Madness" (featuring members of the school drama club), which chronicles the downward spiral of young Jimmy Harper (Christian Campbell) as he succumbs to the evils of dope. With only one puff, Jimmy goes from All American Boy to drug-crazed criminal. Needless to say, coming from the Lecturer’s more-than-slightly evangelical point of view, marijuana is far more lethal and deadly than the public-at-large now knows it to be. But, his partiality makes both Reefer Madness the play-within-the play and the Off-Broadway musical deliriously, rapturously over the top.

Creators Kevin Murphy and Dan Studney, along with director Andy Fickman and choreographer Paula Abdul (yes, you read that right), have fun subverting and paying homage to B-movie conventions. They introduce a cast of archetypal stock characters—the young, innocent lovers, the moll, the slut, the dope-pusher, Jesus Christ (yes, you read that right)—and then keeps sending them a step or two past where we would usually expect to see them end up. Grisly deaths, virgin-to-tramp transformations, and reefer-induced orgies are just the tip of the iceberg in a show that features songs like “Dead Old Man” (in which Jimmy laments to an old man he’s just run over in a stolen car) and “Listen to Jesus, Jimmy” (in which, you guessed it, Jesus urges Jimmy not to slide down the slippery path of temptation).

The pop-based score is appropriately hyper, and lots of fun. Studney’s music is very tuneful, and Murphy’s lyrics are just plain wrong (which I mean in the best sense of the term). Director Fickman and his designers—Walt Spangler (sets), Robert Perry (lights), and Dick Magnanti (costumes)—have created the kind of (ridiculously funny) hellish, drug-den netherworld you’d expect the Lecturer to show the high schoolers. And, Abdul’s choreography is terrific. She comfortably fills the cozy Variety Arts stage with an ensemble of four to six (in addition to the principals), and energetic, good old fashioned dancing. Abdul knows how to build and execute a production number, and I, for one, am glad to see that. Reefer Madness is yet another example of a new musical returning to a tried-and-true form—musical theatre dance—that there’s been a dearth of on New York stages for far too long.

The cast is excellent all around. Campbell is believable and funny in his all-too-improbable transformation from clean-cut kid to drug-addicted lunatic. Kristen Bell is wonderful as Jimmy’s virginal girlfriend, Mary. She has a beautiful voice, and is a very strong actor. Her Act I solo, “Lonely Pew,” in which Mary laments Jimmy’s absence beside her at church, is intended to be another source of laughs, but Bell’s conviction turns it into a genuinely moving moment. Edelman has fun and hams things up beautifully as the Lecturer (who also performs utility roles in the play-within-a-play). The priceless Michele Pawk cuts a comic, sexy swath as Mae, Hostess of the Reefer Den. And, Robert Torti slays the audience doing double duty as Jack, the dope-pusher, and the most, cocky, swaggering, lounge-singing (not to mention Jewish) Jesus Christ ever portrayed on stage or screen. John Kassir and Erin Matthews also stand out as Ralph, the resident frat-boy dope addict, and Sally, the Reefer Slut.

Despite its important social message (i.e., don’t do drugs), Reefer Madness never aims to be anything more than vulgar fun. And it succeeds. What else could one ask from a musical that not only features a program insert with actual, 1930s anti-marijuana propaganda, but also includes a free screening of its cult classic namesake every Thursday night after the show? Go check out Reefer Madness, and fall under its enticing spell.

With Songs of Paradise, the venerable Folksbiene Yiddish Theatre offers a light-hearted, gentle, contemporary spin on several familiar Bible stories. This diverting little musical describes itself as a modern-day Purimshpil (literally "Purim Play," the name given to the first productions of itinerant Yiddish theatre troupes). But it would be just as accurate to compare it to Webber and Rice's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat; like that show, Songs of Paradise appropriates signposts of current popular culture to make the Old Testament vivid and accessible to a modern audience. And, like Joseph, it largely succeeds.

So we have Adam enjoying himself in Paradise, relaxing in a loud floral print shirt and bermuda shorts on a lawn chair while Eve nags about the serpent and the apple tree. We have Cain, in a baseball hat and sneakers, bothering a very pregnant, very worn out Eve (she tells him to complain to his grandmother: think about it). And we have a Tevye-like Abraham, torn between his kvetching wife Sarah and his sexy concubine Hagar, the latter got up enticingly in harem pants and veils like a belly dancer.

In Act Two, pop icons like Marlon Brando, Groucho Marx, and Woody Allen turn up, standing in, respectively, for Esau, Laban, and Potiphar. All three are impersonated, deliciously, by Spencer Chandler, who despite the ensemble structure of the show dominates it with canny humor and high spirits. Which is not to suggest that his four fellow cast members don't each get their moments to shine: Lia Koch is a sexy but sensitive Hagar; Yelena Shumelenson-Rickman sparkles as a waitress (in Rivke's Place, the unlikely setting for the tale of Jacob and Esau); Jake Ehrenreich is engaging as Abraham and Jacob, among others; and Theresa Tova is hilarious as put-upon mother Eve and love-starved matron Zuleyka (Potiphar's wife).

The music, by Rosalie Gerut, is pleasing and covers a wide range of styles from gospel to light rock to klezmer. The book, by Mirian Hoffman and Rena Borow is inventive and funny, playfully updating the Old Testament tales. The book--and Itsik Manger's poems, which are Songs of Paradise's lyrics--are mostly in Yiddish, by the way. No simultaneous English translation is provided so what Folksbiene's artistic director Eleanor Reissa likes to call the Yiddish-impaired (which includes yours truly) are on their own. Is this problematic? Not too: subtleties whoosh over your head while the more fluent laugh or sigh appreciatively; but the stories are so familiar that they're easy to follow in any language. And it's a hoot, by the way, to listen to Groucho and, especially, Brando spout Yiddish in their trademark vocal styles, here rendered beautifully by the multitalented Chandler.

Not everything works: a wrestling match between Rachel and Leah falls flat, and the segment about Jacob's visitation by the angels goes on too long. But the show is constantly diverting and, as you would expect from a Folksbiene offering, extremely well executed.

I walked out of the new musical Summer of '42 humming the lighting.

Okay, that's glib; it's also not entirely true, because the famous theme song from the movie was also swimming around my head. That song, alas, is not heard at the Variety Arts Theatre, where indeed the only member of the creative team behind Summer of '42 who has been successful in conveying what I imagine to be its spirit is lighting designer Tim Hunter. Hunter has created painterly and, yes, cinematic backdrops for the show's many scenes, offering a gorgeous deep blue evening sky to frame From Here to Eternity-ish romance on the beach, and manufacturing a dazzling golden sunrise that is simply unforgettable.

But nothing else about this misbegotten show approaches the beauty of Hunter's work. That's because this story, at least as adapted by book writer Hunter Foster and composer/lyricist David Kirshenbaum, never feels like anything but a movie. I've never seen the film Summer of '42, but the scenes people talk about–buying rubbers at the drugstore, date night at the movies, climactic wish-fulfilling sex with the older woman–all come across vividly in this show as filmic experiences. The trouble is, we're seeing a live musical play.  But there's no evidence of life here.

What there is, aplenty, is coarse humor; lumbering, overdesigned sets that cause director/choreographer Gabriel Barre to abandon any sort of spatial logic in his staging and to refrain from prolonged dancing because there's no place to put it; and repetitive, dull, toneless music that almost always sounds like retreads of William Finn or Andrew Lloyd Webber recitative underscoring.

The story, by the way, is about a 15-year-old named Hermie vacationing on an island off the coast of New England, where he meets and has life-changing experiences with a young war bride who becomes a war widow before the summer is over. Feelings of fleeting loss and even more fleeting connection, against a backdrop of a nation at war, would be welcome and timely nowadays; Foster, Kirshenbaum, and their collaborators can't summon up a single one. If it weren't for Hunter's intoxicating lighting, we'd feel nothing at all in this callow, hollow musical.

A spoiled rich girl finds an enchanted frog in Central Park. At its request, she takes it home with her, it turns into a prince (named Alfred the Average), and just as you'd expect, he is quickly drafted as a presidential candidate by the fledgling "fourth" party called the Feudals.

Wait—maybe that's not what you'd expect. In That's the Ticket!, the good-naturedly loopy comedy by Harold Rome and Julius and Philip Epstein that Musicals Tonight! has rescued from theatre history's dust heap, unexpected things happen all the time. Part screwball comedy, part fairy tale, part savvy political satire, That's the Ticket! is a surprisingly wonderful find. Once again, we must say bravo to enterprising impresario Mel Miller for finding yet another forgotten gem from America's musical comedy past.

Which is not to say that That's the Ticket! is a candidate for Broadway; far from it. What we're seeing here is a meticulous recreation of a show that closed after a single week out of town (in Philadelphia, for the record), at a time when most shows got four to six weeks of tuning up before they arrived in New York. So this show never went through the rearranging, rewriting, and rethinking that even most Broadway flops experienced; we're talking very raw material, here: stuff that was probably ahead of its time in 1948, stuff that was already tired from overuse, and plenty more stuff that just plain doesn't belong. It's tantalizing to guess what Rome, the Epstein Brothers, and director/choreographer Jerome Robbins might have ultimately made out of it all. Tantalizing but, some 54 years on, rather foolhardy.

So why see That's the Ticket!? Well, for starters, there's a deliciously witty libretto—one that needs cutting, to be sure, but one that contains any number of choice, barbed jokes at the expense of American presidential politics in general and greedy conservatives in particular, two targets that never seem to go out of style. There's also a charming score by the man who would go on to write Call Me Mister, Wish You Were Here, Fanny, and I Can Get it for You Wholesale: a bona-fide would-have-become-a-standard ballad called "Cry, Baby," a smart comic list song about money called, well, "The Money Song," and a pair of numbers, "Looking for a Candidate" and "Gin Rummy Rhapsody" that suggest that the creators of Fiorello! had a peek at this score before writing theirs fourteen years later.

There's also an opening (and complementary closing) number that suggests the brilliant heights that Jerome Robbins was about to scale.

The masterful musical comedy character man George S. Irving was in the original cast of That's the Ticket!; a spry eighty years young, he now heads the cast of this production as the Feudal Party's leader, a rabidly regressive businessman by the name of Vale-Waterhouse. It's a treat and a privilege to have Irving on stage again: he handles the bulk of the show's comedy with consummate panache, and literally stops the show with "The Money Song."

Irving shares the limelight with David Staller, who is excellent as the stalwart but clueless prince/frog Alfred; Rita Harvey, as the attractive young woman who rescues Alfred from his spell; Michael Mendiola, very funny as the slippery political operative Joe; and Andrew Gitzy and Edward Prostak, who offer effective support as Whyte and Green, two other political hacks.

Musicals Tonight! never fails to delight as it leads us to yet another forgotten corner of our musical theatre heritage, revealing unexpected insights and attitudes even as it lets us rediscover jokes, songs, and business that have been consigned to obscurity, sometimes deservedly, often not. That's the Ticket! ranks among the most entertaining shows in the series thus far.

I overheard producer Mel Miller tell a patron that in 1948, when That's the Ticket! was written, shows like this were a dime a dozen. Today, though, a show like this is genuinely special. Which is precisely true: musical theatre buffs in particular won't want to miss this one.

This summer when you cross the threshold into the cabaret space at The Duplex you also move through a time warp. It's suddenly sixty years ago (right in the middle of WWII), and we're at the Hollywood Canteen, where show biz celebrities do their bit for the war effort by entertaining the soldiers, sailors, marines, and flyboys who are about to ship out. Our hostesses tonight are the Andrews Sisters and they're right out front greeting us, in their honorary WAC (or is it WAVE?) uniforms, putting us at ease and, later, even serving us fresh donuts.

Okay, I should tell you right now that these are not, of course, the actual Andrews Sisters, but rather astonishing facsimiles played by three shockingly talented men in drag named Trauma Flintstone (Patty), Brent Kaiwi (Maxene), and Mark Sargent (LaVerne). The hair is obviously not real, the voices aren't the least bit feminine, and the get-ups are just this side of grotesque. But when they break out into "Bei Mir Bist du Schoen" or "Sing! Sing! Sing!" or, at the encore, "Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy," the harmonies are glorious, and the sincere eagerness to entertain no matter what catastrophes may wait for us outside is absolutely palpable. This soldier felt entirely ready to take on the world after these Andrews Sisters worked their magic.

They're joined, by the way, by crooner Frankie Davero, who is portrayed by Curtis Conlin with the careless insouciance that characterized another Frankie of that era; and by Canteen waitress Helen Tremaine (Toni Smith), who just happens to have a knockout soprano and stops the show with a heartfelt "I'll Be Seeing You." There's also a cute young sailor named Biff Baxter (played by Joe Levesque) who turns out to be inordinately versatile: he cavorts as Carmen Miranda at one point and then sings the heck out of "Minnie the Moocher" later on. (This fellow Levesque is spectacular: a talent absolutely to keep an eye on.)

The Andrews Sisters' Hollywood Canteen is almost entirely wall-to-wall swing/wartime classics, from "Take the A Train" to "Buy Bonds" to a niftily choreographed rendition of "It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing." (Pause for kudos to director-choreographer Donna Drake, who makes the show as seamless and fast-paced as it needs to be.) There's a little bit of comedy thrown in, including some suggestive innuendo involving Maxene and Frankie and Patty and Eleanor Roosevelt. And there's just enough audience interaction, most charmingly a dance interlude in which Patty good-naturedly pairs up the men in the crowd after cutting the rug a bit her(him)self.

The Gift of Love is a sweet, entertaining new musical based on O. Henry's story "The Gift of the Magi." In that tale, you will recall, poor but devoted young marrieds Jim and Dell wind up selling their most prized possessions to buy Christmas gifts for one another (if you don't know the ending's famous twist I won't spoil it for you here). Authors David Christian Azarow and Hannah Price have done a fine job building their musical around the original, and under Robert Kreis's heartfelt direction a company of eleven high-spirited and energetic performers bring it to life. Particularly vivid among the ensemble are Darin Guerrasio and Cole Razzano, who play Jim and Dell; Gyda Arber, as saucy Madame Sofronie; and young Melissa Gavin, as 9-year-old Tommy, who practically steals the show with her lively solo in "Are Your Ready?", a fun Christmas Eve number.

The best thing about the show, though, is its music--a succession of excellent theatre songs ranging from the soaring "A Brush and a Stroke" to the merrily comic "The Tale of Willie Thorton" to the lilting waltz "Christmas Ball" to the gorgeous title tune. Composer Azarow, whose NYC debut this is, is unequivocally a rising young talent to keep an eye on.

Yuck.

Honest, that was the first word that came into my head after The Last 5 Years' much-advertised 83 minutes came to an end. A composer's equivalent of Contact, I guess, The Last 5 Years is an exercise in, to quote from the musical Chicago, unmitigated ego. The owner of that ego is composer-lyricist-librettist-orchestrator Jason Robert Brown, and he apparently doesn't mind that we are likely to read this brittle, narrow, faux-artistic chamber musical as autobiography. It's a sorry reflection of his talent and his soul.

The Last 5 Years is about a young novelist named Jamie and a young actress named Cathy and the five years of their relationship. The musical's style is defined by a gimmicky and unworkable concept whereby, in alternating scenes, Jamie's side of the story is told forwards and Cathy's side is told backwards. The moment that Norbert Leo Butz and Sherie Rene Scott avoid looking at each other at the very beginning of the show it's clear that the lack of connection is going to be problematic. The two meet briefly at the show's center to interact, but any hint of passion, or engagement, or romance is consigned to one-sided scenes, played gamely by either Butz or Scott to empty air.

The dynamics of the relationship are roughly as follows: Jamie is a successful Jewish novelist on the rise who wants a pretty blonde shikse trophy wife; Cathy is a pretty blonde shikse who needs someone to need, her so-called acting career an abysmal failure. The deck is stacked so nastily against Cathy that it's a wonder that Scott makes any sort of impression here (though she in fact gets the show's only witty or original material, a song about auditioning called "When You Come Home to Me"). Butz plays Jamie's insufferableness straight, which is to say with exuberance but without charm.

The show is almost entirely sung-through. The songs are mostly undistinguished, though a few of Jamie's are jarringly distasteful. Brown seems to be hung up on being Jewish and women's breasts—these themes recur frequently in the pedestrian lyrics.

The set (by Beowulf Boritt) consists mostly of an enormous depiction of a garden wedding party, set sideways and looming over the proceedings; it is both striking and ridiculous.

I wanted to like The Spitfire Grill. It's a musical in the Rainmaker-Music Man mode: a stranger arrives in an (emotionally) parched small town in the Midwest and awakens it--and herself--to possibilities they never knew they had. The stranger in this case is Percy Talbott, a young woman just out of jail who has journeyed to tiny, remote Gilead, Wisconsin because she saw a picture of its autumn leaves in a magazine.

In Gilead, she is immediately put to work for Hannah Ferguson, proprietress of the Spitfire Grill. When Hannah falls in the middle of the night and breaks her hip, her nephew's wife Shelby signs on to help out; it's the budding friendship between Percy and Shelby that drives the story, with them eventually hatching a scheme to help Hannah sell the Grill and retire. Meanwhile, handsome Sheriff Joe Sutter, who is also Percy's parole officer, falls in love with this strange young woman who has somehow galvanized the town.

Everybody in Gilead seems to be harboring some kind of secret. Before The Spitfire Grill is over, we'll learn about Hannah's son, who was assumed to be MIA in Vietnam, and her nephew, who still hasn't gotten over the shutdown of the mine where he once served as foreman. And of course we'll find out just what the circumstances were that sent Percy to jail five years before.

Well, as I said, I really wanted to like this show. It got a very warm reception from the audience at the performance attended, but I have to admit that it left me cold. The elusive small town dreamscape that people were, I think, responding to completely eluded me: I just didn't find anything substantive at the heart of The Spitfire Grill. We're told that Percy has somehow turned little Gilead into a kind of paradise. But the miracle that she's supposed to have worked is neither depicted nor explained.

James Valcq and the late Fred Alley are the co-authors of The Spitfire Grill, which they adapted from a movie by Lee David Zlotoff. I don't know the film, but I bet it has more than seven characters in it: the town of Gilead is the protagonist of the piece, but we never get a sense for it here, with a mere six of its residents (Percy's a stranger, remember) available for our inspection.

Color, light, and sustained laughter are also missing from David Saint's staging, which is further hampered by a mammoth unit set by Michael Anania that covers virtually every inch of playing space and leaves no room for some much-needed choreography. The score (music by Valcq, lyrics by Alley) is attractive but repetitive; a big rousing chorus here and there would be welcome. But The Spitfire Grill's creators seem determined to make a moody chamber musical, even though their material cries out for something airier and more expansive.

Phyllis Somerville, who plays Hannah, provides the evening's happiest moments. Her character begins as a crotchety old lady, but she quickly blossoms into a kind, life-affirming individual. Her smiles--which are broad and warm and blessedly frequent--fill the stage with the pure joy that's otherwise absent from this show that's supposed to be about the simple pleasures of small town life.

I can't think of a nicer way to spend the holidays than at the Irish Repertory Theatre in the company of the lively denizens of The Streets of New York. As adapted and directed by Charlotte Moore, this merry melodrama by Dion Boucicault is a charmer–the ideal escapist diversion for weary, post-September 11th audiences.

I say ideal because what I discovered as I lost myself in this delightful new musical is that what I crave, in these uncertain times, is moral certainty. Of this there is plenty in The Streets of New York: there's never any doubt as to which characters are good or which characters are evil or where any of them are headed as this tall tale wends its way–deliciously–through endless complications toward a resoundingly happy ending. Moore and her extraordinarily felicitous collaborators, on stage and off, have created a vivid, melodious, and exciting show, filled with what used to be called thrills, chills, and spills, and put over with unsurpassed good humor and cheer.

The Streets of New York begins, in a Prologue, in 1837, at the Nassau Street office of one Gideon Bloodgood, a crooked banker who is about to abscond with his depositors' money when a stranger appears on his doorstep. The stranger turns out to be Captain Patrick Fairweather, and he wants to deposit $100,000 in Bloodgood's bank. Bloodgood takes the money, but before he can make his getaway, Fairweather returns. Having learned that Bloodgood is a thief, he demands his money back; unfortunately, he is suddenly struck with an attack of apoplexy and thereupon dies in the banker's office.

Bloodgood of course steals the dead many's money, and all would be finished were it not for the fact that his clerk, Brendan Badger, has surreptitiously pocketed the receipt, which is the only proof of Bloodgood's crime. Now fast forward twenty years to 1857: Bloodgood is now more prosperous than ever, shamelessly indulging his preternaturally spoiled daughter Alida (see photo above). Meanwhile, Captain Fairweather's widow and two children, Lucy and Paul, are living in squalor in Manhattan's Five Points district on the charity of a working-class baker named Puffy. Lucy is in love with aristocratic Mark Livingstone, while Paul is taken with the rough-hewn but obvious charms of the Puffys' daughter Dixie. Mark, though scion of a rich and prominent family, is himself broke, which makes him a suitable target for Alida Bloodgood, who decides to buy herself a husband to attain standing in New York society.

And then of course there's Badger, returned from California with the 20-year-old receipt still intact. He shows up at Bloodgood's bank intent on committing a bit of extortion; but his innate goodness quickly exerts itself and before long he's hatching up plot after plot to restore the $100,000 to the Fairweathers.

Confused? Don't be: Boucicault and Moore are your assured guides through this engaging (and deliberate) morass of device and complication. It doesn't spoil a thing to tell you that Alida does not wind up with Mark, or that Bloodgood does not get to keep the $100,000, or that our Heroes–Fairweathers, Puffys, Livingstone and Badger–do not end the play unhappy or poor. The fun is the journey, which Boucicault has littered with coincidences, sentimentality, and–above all–incident; and which Moore has staged with wit and panache and tongue firmly in cheek.

Moore's designers have a field day: Hugh Landwehr has provided a clever and versatile set and Linda Fisher has created pretty and appropriate costumes, with the creations worn by Alida the last word in opulence. Clifton Taylor's lighting is superlative. Landwehr and Taylor collaborate on an on-stage conflagration at the Act Two climax in the style of 19th century "transformations"–it's truly spectacular.

The company is splendid. Peter Cormican and Terry Donnelly are warm and hearty as the Puffys, and Danielle Ferland is a hoot as their unrefined daughter Dixie, half Little Red Riding Hood, half Annie Oakley. Joshua Park is immensely appealing as young Paul Fairweather, while Donna Kane is the epitome of 19th century virtuous womanhood as his sister Lucy (and she swoons with subtlety and style, too). Margaret Hall is fine as their long-suffering mother.

Ray DeMattis is suitably slimy as villainous Bloodgood, and Kristin Maloney practically steals the show whenever she's on stage as the lustily rotten Alida--think Scarlett O'Hara left to do her unbridled worst. Christopher Lynn contributes two bright cameos as the apoplectic Fairweather pere and a slippery Duke who is wooing Alida (Lynn and Maloney's tango in Act Two is a highlight). And Irish Rep favorite Ciarán O'Reilly (in photo, above) is blissfully jovial as shrewd old Brendan Badger, the quintessential blarney-spouting lovable Irish-American rogue.

Mark Hartman leads the three-piece orchestra with gusto. (He's on piano; his colleagues are Peter Lewy on cello and Alicia Lagger on violin.)

The Streets of New York is the must unabashedly goodtime musical to arrive all season. It's light-hearted high spirits make it perfect for the holiday season and ideal entertainment for the entire family. Give your family the Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Hanukkah present they deserve this year: take a stroll down memory lane with Irish Rep's Streets of New York.

Jonathan Larson was born in 1960. If, like me, you were born within a few years of him, I think you'll find tick, tick... BOOM! to be very much the musical of your generation. There's a moment, early in the piece, when its main character--who is, not at all coincidentally, a theatre composer nearing his thirtieth birthday in January, 1990, when the show takes place--observes that what happens to people who have ideals is that they get shot or they get corrupted. Bingo: Larson has boiled down the experiences of American kids who lived through the assassinations of Robert Kennedy  and Martin Luther King when they were in elementary school and Watergate when they were entering high school. Kids older than us weren't kids anymore when Watergate hit, and kids younger than us didn't remember 1968.

The point is, when Larson died--in early 1996, shortly before his masterwork Rent opened at New York Theatre Workshop--people my age lost an honest-to-God spokesperson. All you need to do is see tick, tick... BOOM! to understand why.

On the surface, tick, tick... BOOM! seems very much a run-of-the-mill time-to-grow-up/oh-my-God-I'm-thirty-and-what-have-I-done-with-my-life sort of thing. Jonathan, its autobiographical central figure, has been trying to break through as a theatre composer in New York City for years now, but he's still nothing more than a Promising Unknown (emphasis on the second word), he's still supporting himself working as a waiter at a local diner, and he's still living in a semi-squalid walk-up in Soho. His best friend Michael, on the other hand, has quit acting to become an upwardly mobile marketing exec, complete with designer suits, BMW, and fabulous new apartment. And his girlfriend, Susan, is ready to abandon her dreams of a dancing career and settle down in New England (where, she points out, she can have a dishwasher).

And Jonathan, preparing for an unwanted surprise party commemorating the end of three possibly squandered decades on the planet, and anxiously awaiting the workshop production of his latest musical "Superbia," keeps hearing tick, tick... BOOM! The ticking is some kind of biological clock tracking his life's progress (or lack thereof). The BOOM! is the explosion of his deepest, darkest nightmare: what if everything blows up before he has the time to do what he needs to do?

It's that BOOM! that sets this show apart: Jonathan's determination to do something important isn't mere earnestness, it's a crusade--one that will resonate, I am certain, with lots of 40-or-so-year-olds in the audience. The specter of AIDS, the defining plague of our generation, makes an unsurprising entrance into the story near its end, putting the urgency of Jonathan's mission into sharper focus. And of course the whole piece is informed by what actually happened to the real Jonathan Larson, though thankfully we lost him only after he had delivered the work that, as he puts it here, may well have redefined the shape of musical theatre for a new generation.

There are foreshadowings of Rent all over the tick, tick... BOOM! score, by the way: a song called "No More," in which Jonathan helps Michael celebrate his expensive new digs, bears more than a casual resemblance to Rent's title song; "Green Green Dress" feels like it might be a precursor to "Out Tonight" or perhaps "I'll Cover You"; and the brilliant anthemic "Louder Than Words," which closes the show, is certainly the spiritual antecedent to "What You Own." The score also has several quite wonderful comic set pieces, including "Sugar," a paean to Twinkies sung in a corner deli, and "Sunday," a masterful parody of/tribute to Stephen Sondheim's song of the same title (from Sunday in the Park with George) which is performed and staged with gleeful relish (watch for Jonathan to run offstage at the very last moment of the number, only to return with the finishing touch--an imaginary monkey on a leash for his "Dot"). This tour de force must please Sondheim enormously; in any event, the master makes a delightful cameo appearance of sorts in this show that suggests a sincere appreciation of Larson's talent.

Indeed, the book and songs of tick, tick... BOOM!, while far from perfect, remind us how good he was and how sad for the theatre was his untimely death.  Director Scott Schwartz and choreographer Christopher Gattelli have provided a beautiful staging, which is well-served by Anna Louizos's simple, atmospheric unit set, David Zinn's appropriate costumes, and Kenneth Posner's evocative lighting. The four-piece band, led by Stephen Oremus, sounds great.

Amy Spanger and Jerry Dixon are fine as Susan and Michael (and even better in a variety of other roles). The revelation here is Raul Esparza, whose performance as Jonathan is vivid and heartfelt and (one hopes) star-making. Esparza's energy is palpable and infectious, as if he were channeling Larson's; and the sensitivity of his acting is simply heart-stopping. Watch him listen to one of Spanger's characters sing the big song from Superbia: the sheer rapture of one artist appreciating another, coupled with the joy of an artist knowing that his own work is good--well they're both right there on Esparza's face, for us to see and, yes, feel. It's a spectacularly good performance, and should lead to good things in the future for this talented young actor.

But I hope he stays with tick, tick... BOOM! for a while--at least long enough for me to see it again. This show's open-hearted and life-affirming spirit--it's grace--is potent, nourishing, and necessary. We're fortunate that its producers (Victoria Leacock, Robyn Goodman, Dede Harris, Lorie Cowen Levy, and Beth Smith) understand this and have made a gift of it to us now.

Tintypes is a modest, polite, and tasteful review of American culture and American life at the turn of the last century. It's lovely; but what you keep wishing for is a brash, rowdy, raucous review instead. The Teddy Roosevelt era was a time of Sousa marches and Joplin rags and dialect vaudeville comedians. All of that is recreated in Tintypes, but in oddly distancing fashion. This is precisely the moment for a rousing display of nostalgic, patriotic Americana. But Tintypes is about as rousing as afternoon tea at the Ritz.

This is not the fault, mind you, of the five enthusiastic performers on stage at the McGinn/Cazale Theatre (of whom one, Josh Alexander, has real appeal and star quality–I expect we'll be seeing more of him elsewhere). Nor is it the fault of musical director Greg Pliska, whose inspired renditions of syncopated tunes like "Ragtime Nightingale" by Joseph F. Lamb and "Pastime Rag" by Artie Matthews are the highlights of the evening.

No, the problem with Tintypes is that its creators, Mary Kyte, Mel Marvin, and Gary Pearle, are trying to create elegant gold leaf out of pure brass. The American spirit that's captured in songs like Smith and Hoschna's "Electricity," Cohan's "Yankee Doodle Dandy," Cannon's "Bill Bailey, Won't You Please Come Home," or Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever" is the exact opposite of precious. This stuff is raw, roughhewn, giddily alive and entirely unapologetic. But its presentation here always feels stilted and artificial, as if the show's creators were embarrassed by its lack of sophistication.

So numbers get forced uncomfortably into sociopolitical contexts where they don't fit: Victor Herbert's "I Want That I Want When I Want It" becomes Theodore Roosevelt's anthem for the Panama Canal; and Williams & Walker's "She's Gettin' More Like White Folks Every Day" is staged as an apologia for minstrelsy. Or they're tossed in with no context whatsoever: "Meet Me in St. Louis" heads up a section called "Wheels"; and "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen" sits weirdly in a segment labeled "The Factory."

There are some genuine lost treasures in this score: Bert Williams' classic "Nobody," a women's rights tune called "Fifty-Fifty," an Italian dialect patter song called "Teddy, Da Roose." And there are plenty of familiar melodies that get the feet stomping and the heart pounding, from "You're a Grand Old Flag" to "Alexander's Ragtime Band." If only Tintypes' creators would cut loose a bit, there really would be–to quote another title–a hot time in the old town tonight.

John Ford gave ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore a great title, one of the strangest brother-sister relationships in theater, a cast of violence-prone misanthropes, and a pessimistic atmosphere. Giovanni and Annabella fall in love, damning both the consequences and themselves. Inevitably, other suitors come knocking, and kill each other to possess her. But when Annabella discovers that she’s pregnant, she marries the richest suitor, who also turns out to be the meanest. But before he can punish her, her brother kills her, his rival, and himself.

Writing a few decades after Shakespeare, Marlowe, and other phenomenally complex playwrights, Ford seems to have wanted the last word on tragic deviancy. He had it, and the Puritans closed the theatres for twenty years. In the intervening 400 years, however, audiences have seen and enjoyed more lurid spectacles. In searching for a way to make ’Tis Pity indecent again for the audiences of the Women’s Shakespeare Company, R.J. Tolan and P.J. Cacioppo add punk rock to Ford’s script.

Shakespearean drama and punk rock would seem to have no common ground. But theatre in London was rowdy and disreputable, to the point where it took place across the river in the 16^th century equivalent of Long Island City. Playwrights and actors were routinely arrested, sometimes for political views but more often for brawling. They filled plays with fighting, sex, criminal behavior, sex, radical politics, and sex. So Tolan and Cacioppo’s decision to stage Ford’s classic as a punk rock musical makes some sense.

This conceit encourages the adapters to make some clever choices, including staging the show in a basement club on West 39^th Street. The music often replaces soliloquies and moments of extreme emotion, as when Annabella sings a “forget me” ballad as Giovanni reads the letter that tells him she’s married and pregnant. While Cacioppo’s lyrics are often incomprehensible due to bad mixing, they’re sung with energy and, in the cases of Jaime Andrews (Annabella) and Rachel diCerbo (Hippolita), with vocal skill. Generally, the music is as fun as anything you’re likely to hear on a Friday night. However, the stylish costumes—more ’90s leather and vinyl than ’70s combat boots and safety pins—are too generic to reveal the wearer’s character. The lighting doesn’t bear mentioning, maybe because there wasn’t a designer (there isn’t one credited). If true, it’s unfortunate, since a talented designer could’ve lit the show like a rock concert to highlight (or undercut) the emotions conveyed by the music.

Like all productions by the Women’s Shakespeare Company, ’Tis Pity features an all-female cast, though it plays the genderbending straight: as in Shakespeare’s time, the characters are male or female, no matter who’s playing them. As Giovanni, Lisa Raymond sulks like a wannabe Hamlet, but her performance loses subtlety as the show goes on. Jaime Andrews seems more comfortable as Annabella transforms from a frivolous girl into a tragic lover. Giving the most consistent performance in the cast, Dorothy Abrahams plays Annabella's devious Spanish henchman with gleeful broadness, an unequivocal villain. She’s also the easiest to understand through the blank verse. And making the most of a minor role, Kelly Ann Sharman clowns around as Berghetto, who aspires to Clockwork Orange-like thuggishness but enjoys himself too much to really be frightening. Her postmortem punk anthem is the musical highlight of the evening.

As director and adapter, Tolan cuts out almost half of the script. These edits speed up the evening but lose enough plot points that they confuse the audience. Also problematically, he allows many actors to play only the general emotion of the scene rather coaching them on the meaning behind each word and phrase. Fortunately, Tolan’s basic punk rock concept zeroes in on the script’s fatalism. This is where the punk setting makes the most sense. After characters die, they sing to the audience with punk abandon: they’re happy to be free from the drudgery of life, but they’re even happier that they died on their own terms. Following the final bloodbath, the corpses rise up for a rousing “fuck you” anthem whose message—live and die on your own terms—neatly summarizes the love affair between Giovanni and Annabella.

Mel Miller's eleventh Musicals Tonight! production is at once his most ambitious and most invaluable production to date: the staged concert revival of the 1914 Irving Berlin show Watch Your Step is a veritable treasure trove for anyone interested in the American musical theatre. Miller has heroically located (and adapted) the libretto of this 87-year-old show, which turns out to be the handiwork of Harry B. Smith; Smith (1860-1936) was the most prolific writer in musical theatre history, with a career spanning its formative years (the heyday of Weber & Fields and Victor Herbert) through its early maturity in the late teens and '20s (collaborating with composers like Jerome Kern and Berlin).

I've never actually seen a Harry B. Smith musical; unless you're well into your 60s, chances are you haven't either, because they just don't get done anymore. So Watch Your Step is spectacularly instructive: barely recognizable as musical comedy, it's much more akin to vaudeville, with its foolish but complicated plot literally set aside for long stretches in each act to accommodate a succession of "turns" tailored to the talents of its leading players. Lacking the integration of even a George M. Cohan show, Watch Your Step is jarringly foreign to contemporary audiences in ways that early Gershwin, Kern, and Rodgers & Hart musicals are not: it's like a light farce with songs and dances tossed in more or less at random. Watch Your Step is by no means ripe for full-scale revival, but it sure is fascinating to get a look at!

Even more arresting, though, is the score. It's the first complete one written by Irving Berlin, who was just 26 when he composed it. It's a wondrous blend of operetta, early Tin Pan Alley brashness, and signature Berlin ragtime. A song like "Office Hours," which opens the show's first "book" scene (set in a law office) registers as weird and ponderous today, with a chorus of clerks incongruously dictating love letters to a chorus of secretaries: you can feel Berlin's unease with the form in the pretty but hackneyed melody and the stilted lyrics. But songs like "Lock Me In Your Harem," "I Gotta Go Back to Texas,"  and "Bird of Paradise" are delicious pastiche (though of course they weren't in 1914): dazzling little comic riffs on some of our great-grandparents' pop culture icons (the Egyptian sheik, cowboys, and Hawaiian hula girls, respectively).

And when Berlin gets to break out in joyous and natural syncopation--in still-familiar tunes like "Simple Melody" and "Syncopated Walk," plus a tour de force called "Opera Medley" featuring rag parodies of Rigoletto, Aida, and others--Watch Your Step catches fire. Verdi had been dead just thirteen years in 1914: here was upstart Berlin tweaking the highbrows with the most lowbrow of American music; what's more, here he was, with the sophisticated jazzy counterpoint of "Simple Melody" and the sharp, brazen wit of "Opera Medley," beating them at their own game. What must this have felt like when it was so gloriously and explosively new? Watch Your Step gives us a hint.

What's missing from this revival is the dancing: Watch Your Step was constructed as a vehicle for Vernon and Irene Castle, who were the most famous dance team of their era, responsible for introducing the Castle Walk and many other ballroom dances to America. Some of their material is recreated here in numbers like "Show Us How to Do the Fox Trot" and "I'm a Dancing Teacher Now." Limited choreography is necessarily all that's possible in a concert production such as this; at least we get a sense of what the Castles might have been like.

Director/choreographer Thomas Mills has staged the show with his usual efficiency and wit; and music director/arranger Mark Hartman is invaluable as ever on piano. The cast of seventeen works hard and effectively; standouts are David Sabella, very funny (and in great voice) as the egotistical actor Algy; dynamic Jennifer Miller as the Irene Castle character Stella; and sweet-voiced Alison Walla as ingenue Ernesta Hardacre. Osborn Focht, Michael Dunn Litchfield, Justin Roller, and Matt Toronto offer up appealing four-part harmony in several numbers, including the very entertaining "I Gotta Go Back to Texas."