(3 of 3)
With 42nd Street the failing is plainer. Except for David Brummel as the veteran musical-comedy director and Linda Griffin as the snappy chorine Anytime Annie, nobody in the company can act. The book has always been silly and illogical, and requires high style to bring off its camp excesses. Most at sea is Gina Trano as the kid from the chorus who replaces the injured star. Although she manages a lovely awakening into competence during the course of the musical-within-a-musical, there is nothing special about her in the earlier scenes to justify everyone's much voiced confidence in her talent.
The most popular Broadway show on the road is Cats, which through its three companies has been accounting for about half of current touring-troupe revenues. The two productions viewed deliver at least the raucous pleasures of the original. The version that has been playing in Washington since July has more elaborate lighting and staging effects than one of those that are moving from city to city every week or two, but the differences are minor. The celebrated catlike movements look more Vegas-like now. In both casts, only the dancers playing the secondary role of Alonzo (Ken Nagy in Washington, Stephen Moore touring) achieve the cool detachment of another species. The singing, although always vibrant, is uneven. In the peripatetic cast Andy Spangler glows as the Elvis-like Rum Tum Tugger and Leslie Ellis is haunting as Grizabella, the faded glamour cat, but in the Washington troupe the performers in those roles, Douglas Graham and Janene Lovullo, do not measure up.
One gutsy production radically improves on its Broadway model: the 1966 and 1986 hit Sweet Charity, dazzlingly restaged for a North American tour by its original creator and re-creator, Bob Fosse. From the first appearance in silhouette of the title character, a taxi dancer who in the face of all experience remains a fool for love, to the ironically identical finale, this version zips along with style, assurance and the ingredient it lacked in its 1986 Broadway reprise, real heart. Whereas Debbie Allen seemed too tough, too much a survivor to elicit audience sympathy when she played Charity on Broadway, the road show's Donna McKechnie -- the original Cassie in A Chorus & Line -- manages to be forever vulnerable without seeming stupid. As the buttoned-down businessman who takes up with her, says he can forgive her slightly checkered past and then finds he cannot, Ken Land is more likable and believable than his Broadway counterpart. As a result, what is virtually an identical show plays louder, faster and funnier -- to cite Centenarian Director George Abbott's hallowed instructions to performers -- and also seems more true. It is as bubbly and brisk and bittersweet as Broadway, at home or on the road, is always supposed to be.