Tam Mutu and Scarlett Strallen                                                       Photos credit Joan Marcus

  

                                           by Deirdre Donovan

 

 

Since 1991, City Center Encores! has been one of the darlings of the New York Theater establishment. With its latest offering, Cole Porter's The New Yorkers under the sound direction of John Rando, it can only endear itself more to musical theater connoisseurs.

 

First, a bit of history on The New Yorkers.  Based on the book by Herbert Fields and story by E. Ray Goetz and Peter Arno--the legendary cartoonist from The New Yorker--Porter borrowed the infant magazine’s title and leaned on its worldly wit for his new musical.  It premiered at the Broadway Theatre on December 8th in 1930 with high-in-the-sky hopes.  But, alas, three days later the Bank of the United States shut its doors and the Depression made its entrance.  What should have been a long-running hit turned into a twenty-week sprint on the Great White Way.

 

The plot is the stuff of Prohibition:  We meet the young socialite Alice Wentworth (Scarlett Strallen) who hails from Park Avenue, the place where “bad women walk good dogs” (to borrow the most famous line from the musical).  She falls for the gangster Al Spanish (Tam Mutu) and together they travel to a number of louche venues from New York . . . to Sing Sing . . . and back.  Alice’s father, Dr. Windham Wentworth (Byron Jennings) is a shameless philanderer who doesn’t think twice about wining and dining his mistress Lola McGee (Robyn Hurder) just tables away from where his wife Gloria (Ruth Williamson) and her gigolo Captain Hillary Trask (Tyler Lansing Weaks) are just settling in for lunch. In this head-on collision of the underworld and café society, the action is saturated with gin, punctuated with bullets, and peppered with romance.  One resilient character Feet McGeegan (Arnie Burton) has the uncanny ability of being shot three times, and rising like the mythic Phoenix out of his ashes.  Yes, the Prohibition gets sent-up in both sparkling and smoking style here. 

 

Whereas the original Broadway iteration featured 130 performers who tripped the light fantastic, the recent concert version was greatly scaled-down, counting only a cast of 31.  That said, Director Rando wasted no opportunity to tap into the innate dramatic strengths of The New Yorkers (which was ambitiously reconstructed by Encores! artistic director Jack Viertel, assisted by Rando and musical director Rob Berman, from mere fragments of the “lost” original work).

 

The acting ensemble was uniformly strong.  But several performers were standouts, namely, Tam Mutu playing the rogue Al Spanish and Scarlett Strallen playing opposite him as Alice Wentworth.  Also notable were Byron Jennings, who inhabited Dr. Windham Wentworth with a blue-blood’s nonchalance and Ruth Williamson as his wife Gloria, who overlooked her husband’s sexual dalliances (and didn’t hesitate to indulge in her own).  True, this foursome more than carried the musical through its feather-brained scenes.  And special shout outs go to Arnie Burton as Feet McGeegan. Burton had the hammiest role in the show--and made a meal of it.  His rendering of “Let’s Not Talk About Love” was pattering perfection. (Porter was a died-in-the-wool fan of Gilbert and Sullivan and this number gives it proof).

 

The twenty-plus musical numbers are vintage Porter, with a little help from other artists.  There were a few standards, of course, that audience members could immediately latch onto—and even sing in synch with the cast.  For who hasn’t heard, or felt the sting, in the song “Most Gentlemen Don’t Like Love”?  Or that anthem that celebrates the Big Apple in all of its multi-faceted moods, “I Happen to Like New York.” 

 

If these two songs greeted us like old friends, there were other less-known ballads that cast their own spell for different reasons. “Wood,” sung as an ensemble number, smartly wrapped up Act 1 with crisp syncopated rhythms and sheer brio. No, it’s not a Porter work but came courtesy of the great Schnozzola Jimmy Durante, who sang it at the musical’s Broadway debut.

 

Cyrille Aimée

 

 

Still, nothing topped the lyrical intensity that emanated from the steamy “Love For Sale,” a song about a prostitute that at its original Broadway outing raised the eyebrows of critics and whose lyrics were forbidden to be broadcast on American radio.  Here sung wistfully by the chanteuse Cyrille Aimee, it served here as the emotional highpoint of the musical and the most expressive music of the score. 

 

Porter, in fact, regarded this song as his “step-child” and fiercely defended its aesthetic value.  He once pointedly argued: “You could write a novel about a harlot, paint a picture of a harlot, but you can’t write a song about a harlot.” Yes, this song was put through the mill by the critics and censors in the 1930s. And it was a small miracle to hear it resurrected at City Center.

 

 

All the creatives were in top form. Allen Moyer’s satiny set looked filthy rich, Chris Bailey’s choreography was snappy and smart, and Allen Moyer’s costumes were nothing less than the cat’s meow.  And let’s not forget The Encores! orchestra that was in fine fettle too.

 

Those who visited the latest offering from City Center’s Encores! series enjoyed an intoxicatingly fine sampling of Porter’s tunes.  Does this show possibly have a future on the Great White Way?  Why not?

 

The New Yorkers, seven performances only at City Center from March 22—26.

Encores! series, At City Center, 131 West 55^th Street, Manhattan.

For more information on Encores!, visit www.nycitycenter.org or phone

212-247-0430.

Running time:  2 hours with one intermission.