Noises Off

In what might be the most anticipated production of the season, Roundabout's 50th Anniversary, Noises Off hits the boards this week at the American Airlines Theatre.

I saw the last NYC incarnation of this gem 14 years ago - Click Here - with Peter Gallagher, Patti Lupone, Katie Finneran, TR Knight, Faith Prince, and Edward Hibbert.  Needless to say I have fond and vivid memories of the hilarity that ensued.  Of course when I saw the show for the first time I had no idea what was going to happen - this time around, I sort of knew what was going to play out.

This time around, the indomitable Andrea Martin (Dotty) brought her physical comedy to the stage.  Campbell Scott (Lloyd Dallas), tackles the prickly and frustrated director. David Furr (Garry Lejeune), Megan Hilty (Brooke Ashton), Kate Jennings Grant (Belinda Blair), and Jeremy Shamos (Frederick Fellows) tackle the interlopers.  Tracy Chimo (Poppy Norton-Taylor) and Rob McClure (Tim Allgood) tackle the stage crew roles and Daniel Davis (Selsdon) is the bungling alcoholic burglar.

Anyone who knows anything about Nothing On (the play within the play) knows it is a physical comedy inside the physical comedy Noises Off - Three progressively "worse" acts repeated with disastrously funny consequences.  Timing is more than half the battle and tuning the characters just right is the rest.  I'd say they did a great job at the first part - the timing and physicality was nifty. The set (Derek McLane) was quite literally exactly what I remembered it to be - as if they pulled it out of storage.  What the production lacked, I thought, was a sense of mad-cap pace and hilarity.  It was almost very deliberate and plodding.  Certainly Ms. Martin had moments of glory - mostly in Act I as she labored over the sardines and later when she got tangled in the phone cord.  I remember TR Knight having a bigger part than Mr. McClure - and I don't know why.   Ms. Hilty delivered those stilted and quite literally memorized lines perfectly - and by perfectly I mean at just about the most incorrect time and always mugging to the audience like her character is supposed to.   This time around Mr. Scott walked around the entire theater including the mezzanine with his booming director's voice and I don't remember Mr. Gallagher doing the same except for right down front.  There were plenty of stars in this production although none of them shone overly brightly.  There was plenty of talent and great timing in this production, but nothing transported me.  That could be a bit of the 2nd time around syndrome, or it just might possibly be that the production seemed a bit more farcical and deliberately physical than it needed to be.

In the end, it doesn't much matter.  The family behind me had no idea what was going to happen and half my fun was listening to their reactions in Act 2.  I enjoyed this production but not quite as much as I enjoyed my first one.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Sometimes it takes just one diamond to make a musical sparkle - and Encores! final installment of the 2012 season has several.  With a cornball book by Loos and Fields, silly lyrics by Leo Robin and delicious music by Jule Styne, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes has a rich history of exploding stars into orbit.  In 1949 it introduced Carol Channing to the American lexicon.  In 1953 the movie by the same name propelled Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell's careers into the stratosphere.  This time around, we've got the SMASH *Bombshell*, Megan Hilty (Lorelei Lee) and triple-threat star of the upcoming national tour of Anything Goes, Rachel York (Dorothy Shaw).

Encores! concert renditions are *almost* fully staged.  Books in hand occasionally, but never a missed note or a called line.  The cast aboard the S.S Ile de France is magnificent.  GPB is most surely a dancer's musical - with full-on tap, ballet, and ballroom all packed into several razzle-dazzle numbers in addition such as great vocal numbers as Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend, and I'm Just a Little Girl From Little Rock, and the titular song, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

If I had a vote for the hardest working ensemble in the biz right now, GPB would win hands-down.  Tap dancing can get a crowd to its feet in raucous applause and the tap number with Megan Sikora (Gloria Stark) and Attmore & Grimes (Phillip Attmore and Jared Grimes are their actual names) was nothing short of stupendous.  A well earned standing ovation - and that was just the opening of Act II.  Ms. Hilty tore the roof off the place (encores are a trademark of this show) with 3 encores in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the last one nearly delayed the show by 3 minutes alone due to the uproarious applause.  And I haven't even discussed the to-die-for bodies of the male dancers (shirts on AND off), the hysterical Robert Lemanteur and his son Louis (Brennan Brown and Steven Boyer) or the genius comedic timing of Deborah Rush as Mrs. Ella Spofford or her elegantly tuneful son, Henry (Aaron Lazar).  And lest we not forget to mention the always-delightful and uber-talented Encores! Orchestra - led by Music Director and Conductor Rob Berman... And on... And on...

Now, the show is not perfect.  Don't get me wrong.  It's just that when you combine talent and an old fashioned good-time with top notch dancing, pitch-perfect singing, and great comedic acting it's hard to complain about structure and connecting a few dots with a show that has a run of less than a week!  It's not about that at Encores!  

Is it Broadway bound?   I doubt it - but it may be the closest we get to SMASH's Bombshell being on Broadway this season or next!  Marc Shaiman & Scott Whitman may indeed have all the songs written as we have heard, but ... pssst... Debra Messing nor Christian Borle are *really* book-writers in real life.  Go figure.

Wicked