Musical Review— Rodgers & Hart’s “I Married an Angel” at Encores

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Friday, 29 March 2019 19:37

Written by Kevin Filipski

I Married an Angel

Music & lyrics by Rodgers & Hart; directed & choreographed by Joshua Bergasse

Performances March 20-24, 2019

Sara Mearns (far left) in I Married an Angel (photo: Joan Marcus)

City Center’s Encores—now in its 26th season—regularly resurrects forgotten musicals for a week’s worth of sleek, semi-staged performances. Rodgers & Hart’s I Married an Angel, a frothy concoction based on Hungarian playwright János Vaszary’s play Angyalt Vettem Felesegul, certainly fills the bill: the dance-heavy show ran on Broadway for three years in the 1930s, choreographed by Charles Balanchine for his wife Vera Zorina. Similarly, for Encores, Joshua Bergasse has staged and choreographed it for his wife, Sara Mearns, a principal dancer at New York City Ballet.

The show is silly nonsense—a beleaguered Budapest banker wants nothing to do with women and wishes an angel would come down from heaven to be his wife, which, of course, she does—and is mainly an excuse for some hummable (if not especially memorable) Rodgers & Hart tunes and many nicely executed dances for the angel courtesy of Bergasse. Mearns is a terrific dancer, and her movements are expressive and beautifully done: she even walks around the stage en pointe (on her toes), quite impressive in this context. That her vocal delivery is less on point is nowhere near not fatal; luckily, she has no songs, a blessing of sorts. 

The rest of the cast works hard and, for the most part, effectively: leading man Mark Evans is a mite goofy but capable; Nikki M. James, as his sister, is always charming but occasionally vocally strained; and Hayley Podschun, as a man-chaser extraordinaire, steals every scene she’s in, often tap-dancing up a storm.

The distance between I Married an Angel’s caveman view of women and our #MeToo era seems centuries greater than a mere 80 years, but even the wince-inducing lyrics and dialogue don’t erase its minor pleasures. Encores ends its 2019 season in May with another title straight out of its mandate: High Button Shoes, a Jule Styne-Sammy Cahn musical that premiered on Broadway in 1947.

I Married an Angel

New York City Center, 131 West 55th Street, New York, NY

nycitycenter.org

• < Prev
• Next >