They had their day, and then we threw them away.
And without a sigh we would pass them by
For some other, newer tune.
So off to a happier home they flew,
Where they're always loved and they're always new.
—P.G. Wodehouse, "The Land Where the Good Songs Go"
Since 1994, Encores!, the Tony-winning series of musical revivals at New York's City Center, has been the land where the good songs, and the good shows, go. Every year Encores! mounts three pieces at five performances each, filling the gigantic old theater's 2,750 seats with knowledgeable enthusiasts of the old style, Encores! has brought classic musicals back to life in productions that match meticulous scholarship with showstopping verve. The books of these venerable shows may be on the creaky side, but the tunes in them still sing. Join in a chorus of "Where or When," anybody?
This season, to celebrate the centenary of the first Ziegfeld Follies (which opened at the Jardin de Paris, Broadway and 44th Street, on July 8, 1907), the Encores! management led by Jack Viertel staged three musicals inspired or produced by Ziegfeld's grand old revues. These were extravagant revues featuring vaudeville stars, lavish production numbers and statuesque chorines in eccentric headgear, and they ran annually until 1925, then sporadically for another decade, even after the great impresario's death in 1932. The revue format hung on through the 40s and 50s, with Leonard Sillman's New Faces series and, in more intimate venues, Julius Monk's Plaza 9 shows.
If you want to know everything I ever thought about the first 11 seasons of Encores!, look here. For a 2007 update, here are notes on the three latest shows: Follies, in February, Face the Music in March and a new revue, Stairway to Paradise, devised by Encores! artistic director Jack Viertel and playing, to the usual sold-out houses, through Monday.
The first Encores! entry of 2007, Stephen Sondheim's and James Goldman's Follies, might seem in no need of excavation. The original production, in 1971, is well remembered, indeed cherished, by the folks of a certain age who haunt City Center. The fabulous CD is readily available. In the 80s a famous concert version (also on CD) was performed at Carnegie Hall, and just six years ago a not-so-hot Broadway revival — I should say embalming — was on display.
Yet it was clear from the first note of the Encores! Follies that the best revivals bring a new clarity to old shows. Director-choreographer Casey Nickolaw, whose recent Broadway work (Spamalot, The Drowsy Chaperone) has been spot-on silly, somehow summoned a perfect reading of the antique text, and piqued in people who'd seen the show before one of those "Eureka!" moments. Now, we got it. We saw the maturity, the emotional wisdom in Goldman's libretto. His story — about two married couples who meet 30 years after the girls, chorines in a Ziegfeld-type revue, met their husbands-to-be — was revealed as a brilliant portrait of loves lost, ideals corrupted, obsessions curdled into desperation. Suburban infidelities truly could be the makings of bourgeois tragedy.
Michael Bennett's original production was smart, lavish and cutting. During the "Who's That Woman?" number, in which the aging chorines come to terms with the difference between the 20- and 50-year-old selves, Bennett lowered a stage-wide mirror that caught both the middle-aged actresses on stage and the middle-aged audience, staring at the women and sharing their discomfort. In the second act, the animosities festering in the two main couples explodes into rancorous fantasy in the faux-Ziegfeld "Loveland" section, and Bennett gave Sondheim's comic-poignant torch songs and novelty numbers a splendor that both mocked and deepened the characters' self-pity or numbness.
Nickolaw couldn't match Bennett for sumptuousness — Encores! revivals are staged with just the hint of scenery — but he found so much meaning and ache in the show that it didn't matter. Stripped of its finery, Follies was now pure and profound. He also seamlessly integrated the older stars playing the 1970s characters with the young actors playing their 1940s incarnations, cheerful and naive, committing the one forgivable sin of youth: to hope.
The four leads brought these sad characters alive and hurting. Bouquets all around: to Donna Murphy, as glamorous, tough-as-crimson-painted-nails Phyllis; to Victor Garber, as her successful, empty spouse Ben; and to Michael McGrath, as Buddy, the philandering schlemiel who loves his wife Sally even as she is slipping away from him into Ben's arms. But the revelation was Victoria Clark as Sally. Clark, who had toiled in Broadway obscurity for decades before earning a Tony for her role as the mother in The Light in the Piazza two years ago, was the one true singer in the lead quartet, mining every note for meaning.
Singing "Don't Look at Me," Clark is flirtatious and embarrassed as she meets Ben (whom she's always loved) after all these years. "In Buddy's Eyes" is an expression of the love she tries to feel for her husband. Her Loveland number, "Losing My Mind," may sound like a standard, plangent torch song ("You said you loved me / Or were you just being kind? / Or am I losing my mind?"). But Clark's rendition makes it clear Sally is so desperate and deluded, she is near madness; she is losing her mind. Clark lifted this Follies into the stratosphere of indelible Broadway productions. I can testify to that: after catching a Saturday matinee I marched directly to the box office and bought two tickets for the evening show. Rapture struck twice.
After the banquet of feelings in Follies, the Encores! version of the 1932 Face the Music was a minty palate-cleanser. A topical revue by the young Moss Hart (then 27) and the veteran Irving Berlin (43; he'd live to 101), it has one hit song, "Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee," and lots of impudent attitude, which the revival nicely preserved under John Rando's direction. An expert cast led by Encores! stalwarts Judy Kaye and Walter Bobbie found the fun of bankrupt millionaires and amiably venal cops improbably involved in putting on a Broadway show. It was swell, though I might have preferred Encores! to present Hart and Berlin's next revue, As Thousands Cheer, with a richer score (including "Easter Parade" and "Heat Wave") and a sassier tone. Maybe Encores! skipped it because the show was vibrantly revived in 1998 by the New York company The Drama Department, with a cast that included Judy Kuhn, Howard McGillin, B.D. Wong and that giant bear of musical comedy, Kevin Chamberlin.
Chamberlin is one of the stars of Stairway to Paradise, and so is Berlin; he has six songs in this pastiche of revue numbers from the first years of the 20th century through New Faces of 1952. There are more than 30 tunes, some more familiar than others, and two comedy sketches — the first (the 1923 "The Yellow Peril") a one-gag item in which goldenrod flowers on the stage make all the actors sneezes they speak, the other (the 1949 "Gorilla Girl") about a jungle movie with very dumb starlet and a very smart gorilla. Both sketches cue you that, for just this once, Encores! is out to have a roaring good time.
In the mostly chronological rendition of the songs, a theme does emerge: of social change in America, from before the First World War to after the Second. Along with the love songs and star turns, Stairway has Depression dirges ("Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime"), war anthems (Berlin's, of course) and songs of social significance. But glamour drove the old Ziegfeld revues, and glamour at Encores! is not skin but star quality. The star here is Kristen Chenoweth, that petite package of pyrotechnics who has wowed Broadway in Wicked and, this season, in The Apple Tree (a production that originated at Encores! two years ago). Whether flaunting her coloratura or radiating that elfin sensuousness, she's sensaysh.
Chenoweth gets excellent support from the two comic leads: the giant, sweetly Shrek-like Chamberlin and the smaller Christopher Fitzgerald, who makes me think of Sean Penn reconfigured as a tummeling song-and-dance man. I also liked the unaffected geniality of Shonn Wiley and was dazzled to submission by Kendrick Jones, tap-dancer supreme and a handsome charmer, if I may say, to boot.
In the trunkful of classic pop — Rodgers and Hart's"Manhattan," Dietz and Schwartz' "Dancing in the Dark," Cole Porter's "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye" — I found a few surprises: the 1952 "Guess Who I Saw Today," a quietly devastating ballad of Cheever-like yearning and betrayal, and "Pack Up Your Sins," a Berlin number that was new to me, and wittier than the songs of his I know from this period (1922). Just reading some of the lyrics, you can feel the rhythm and the revelry: "Pack up your sins and go to the Devil in Hades. / You'll meet the the finest of gentlemen and the finest of ladies; / They'd rather be down below than up above — / Hades is full of thousands of / Joneses and Browns, O'Houlihans, Cohens and Bradys." Whether familiar or not, Stairway to Paradise has plenty to appeal to John Q. Public and John Q. Critic alike.
Any show that gathers its material from 50 years of Broadway revues is open to debates about what was left out. And since the Q. in Critic is for Quibble, here are a few. Berlin, with those six (terrific) songs, and Harold Rome, with three (lesser) ones, might be overrepresented in a show meant to be panoramic. The two sketches are amusing, and give the stars a chance to mewl and mug becomingly; but, from the same book (The Greatest Revue Sketches) that Viertel & Co. dipped into, I'd have chosen George S. Kaufman's brief, devastating "If Men Played Cards As Women Do" from Berlin's Third Music Box Revue of 1923. It has a quartet of burly gents punctuating a game of poker by gossiping cattily about clothes, makeup and rivals, and was put on film in the 40s revue Star Spangled Rhythm, with Fred MacMurray, Franchot Tone, Ray Milland and Lynne Overman as the feminine men. I'd like to have seen how it played, especially with the ursine Chamberlin, in 2007.
But nobody, critic or informed amateur, is grousing by the end of the show, when most of the principals join in the 1951 skit-song "Catch Our Act at the Met," by Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Jule Styne. A high-art parody that's up there with Chuck Jones' Daffily Wagnerian "What's Opera, Doc?", the number combines parody, musical virtuosity and about a million laffs. As most every Encores! show does, it sends the audience out of Ciiy Center levitating on a contact high with the best in musical theater. At Encores!, the old shows are always loved and always new.