With the musical in perpetual free fall, revivals are bread and butter now. “Show Boat” and “Crazy for You” prove how very different approaches can mean reborn entertainment and blockbuster success.
“The New Yorkers” is yet a different fish, more a matter of mind-blowing archeology. Nobody’s ever heard of it, despite a Cole Porter score including “Take Me Back to Manhattan,” “Love for Sale” and “Let’s Do It.”
There aren’t many forgotten works like this 1930 one waiting to be unearthed. Uncork all the more bubbly, then, for Anthony Stimac, the New York musical expert who found the show and is now co-directing, with Dyanne Earley, a bright new revival at Marriott’s Lincolnshire Theatre.
While not the reworked extravaganza of “Crazy for You” or “Anything Goes,” “The New Yorkers” is a biting and eccentric bauble. Herbert Fields’ original book–with tinkering by Stimac –opens a nasty window onto the urbane, sophisticated, amoral madness of pre-Depression America.
This is a Manhattan society where affairs and liquor gush forth with guiltless abandon. This is a silly, non-stop humor that later fueled screwball comedy. The plot is more a matter of uninterrupted antics than true conflict or structure; songs come out of nowhere, introduced with the flimsiest dialogue, and the point of it all isn’t even worth trying to find.
“There are two kinds of girls–those who do and those who say they don’t.” “Have you ever been abroad?” “I tried it but got sick of shaving my legs.”
Al Spanish (David Studwell), the story’s Robin Hood of a bootlegger, is associated with an outfit called the Amendment Import Co.: “Our Products Make You See Double and Act Single.”
The Porter classics are supplemented by Porter novelties, including some exquisite rediscoveries. Paula Scrofano, as a society matron who dallies shamelessly with younger men, sings a speedy, wicked lament about her physician-husband’s love for her body parts, with Porteresque rhymes such as “molto bella” and “patella.”
When the hero-bootleggers go off to a country club of a jail, there’s a rousing chorale called “Sing, Sing for Sing-Sing.” For all its madcap silliness, the show reveals a little genuine depth when a chanteuse and Mae West stand-in lets loose with a siren’s song about life as a fifth wheel, “The Extra Gal,” delivered like a stick of dynamite by Kelli Cramer.
The story of Alice Wentworth (played with speed and assurance by Kathryn Jaeck) is that of a dream in flashback, setting up a cartoon universe where overbearing women can be dropped from apartment building windows and return to do more battle; bootleggers are shot and instantly revived.
The production doesn’t always sustain its dizzy pace. But then a Porter classic will come along, and you melt in wonder once again. With new musicals growing rarer every day, here’s a very old one that’s weird and imperfect by our standards, maybe, but boy does it burst from its wrapping with startling, tingling freshness.
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“The New Yorkers”
When: Through June 9
Where: Marriott’s Lincolnshire Theatre
Phone: 847-634-0200
