Hey, Look Me Over!

Conceived by Jack Viertel; directed by Marc Bruni

Performances February 7-11, 2018

City Center’s Encores has as its mission to resurrect obscure or unjustly forgotten musicals for a week’s worth of semi-staged performances. And for the first show of its 25^th anniversary season, we got something called Hey, Look Me Over!, a look at shows that even Encores has passed over for whatever reason—it’s 2-1/2 hours of excerpts from nine musicals that opened on Broadway between 1957 and 1974, but have been (mostly) unheard of since their short runs.

The show’s conceit is that Bob Martin—of Drowsy Chaperone fame—comes onstage as our MC of sorts, introducing the performances and giving us some context, along with some hoary (and a couple of amusing) theater and political jokes. But despite the creakiness of the concept, there is the music and the performances, which is why we are all in the theater in the first place.

To be sure, a lot of what is excerpted for Hey, Look Me Over! is not top-drawer—it’s easy to hear why Cy Coleman’s Wildcat (which includes the evening’s title tune) or Charles Strouse’s All-American have remained obscure—but even when the material isn’t top-notch, the performers are. Take Vanessa Williams, who dazzles in two numbers from Jamaica, a show with music by Harold Arden that was a vehicle for Lena Horne. Or Bebe Neuwirth, who snarls spectacularly as the jaded cruise hostess Mimi in Noel Coward’s witty Sail Away, which was written for Elaine Stritch (whom I saw in a 1999 Carnegie Hall concert version).

Clifton Duncan kills it in “Never Will I Marry” from Frank Loesser’s Greenwillow, Judy Kuhn and Marc Kudisch sing an appealing “Shalom” from Jerry Herman’s Milk and Honey, and Alexandra Socha takes center stage for a thrilling “Look What Happened to Mabel” from Herman’s Mack and Mabel, a flawed but lively musical I saw at Canada’s Shaw Festival in 2007 and which definitely deserves a second life somewhere on a New York stage.

Although the finale—“Give My Regards to Broadway” from George M., with sensational tap-dancing and a surprise guest—is  anti-climactic, Hey, Look Me Over! remains a delightful evening of sheer entertainment, skillfully directed by Marc Bruni, choreographed by Denis Jones and conducted by Rob Berman, whose Encores Orchestra is, as always, the evening’s true highlight.

Hey, Look Me Over!

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

Fire and Air

Written by Terrence McNally

Directed and designed by John Doyle

Performances through February 25, 2018

One of Terrence McNally’s most popular plays, Master Class, had opera’s great diva Maria Callas at its center. Now McNally turns to ballet for Fire and Air, about fabled Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev, who formed the groundbreaking troupe Ballets Russes in the early 20^th century, and his volatile personal and professional relationships, including those with his favorite dancers: Vaslav Nijinsky, his first muse and erstwhile lover, and Léonide Massine, who took over after Nijinsky’s spot after he ran off and got married.

McNally’s play mainly chronicles Diaghilev’s time in Paris, when he took the dance world by storm with his stagings of Debussy’s The Afternoon of a Faun and Stravinsky’s historic The Rite of Spring—which caused a riot at its 1913 premiere. There are also glimpses of Diaghilev’s life away from stage rehearsals, as he alternately relies on and pushes away his oldest friend/cousin/first lover Dima, childhood nanny Dunya—who, improbably, is still taking care of him—and a Russian countess, Misia, whose husband finances Diaghilev’s art.

McNally, who has done his research, combines factual detail with imaginative flights of fancy. But Fire and Air (a nicely evocative title, from Diaghilev’s self-description) ends up an unsatisfying jumble of biography and fictional re-imaging; John Doyle’s typically stripped-down production (consisting of a few chairs and two large mirrors) cleverly visualizes these scenes of an artist’s life from, as it were, different angles.

As the dancers, James Cusati-Moyer (Nijinsky) and Jay Armstrong Johnson (Massine) are lithe and athletic, their toned bodies speaking more eloquently than their acting. The cast’s veterans are Marsha Mason (an amusingly doddering Dunya), Marin Mazzie (a crisply elegant Misia) and John Glover (a believably Russian Dima).

As Diaghilev, British actor Douglas Hodge gives a broad but good-humored portrayal that at times reminded me, unaccountably, of both Nathan Lane and Dom DeLuise. But Hodge does make Diaghilev relatable as more than a self-pitying genius, which gives Fire and Air its intermittent vigor. 

Fire and Air

Classic Stage Company, 136 East 13th Street, New York, NY

classicstage.org