Theatre in Review: Honeymoon in Vegas (Nederlander Theatre)

	Rob McClure, Catherine Ricafort. Photo: Joan Marcus

If we got shows like Honeymoon in Vegas on a regular basis -- say two or three times a year -- Broadway would be a far, far happier place. The time is always right for a high-style musical farce designed to send the audience out the door feeling blissful, especially when it has the swingiest new score you've heard in a long, long time. Filling out this winning hand is a trio of triple threats who sing, dance, and effortlessly woo us into accepting the book's mildly preposterous premise.

For the last several years, it's been obvious that Rob McClure is a star in need of a vehicle. For all his brilliance in the title role, Chaplin wasn't it. He was a delight in Where's Charley? at Encores! at City Center, but only for a weekend. Here he finally gets the role he deserves, as the genial, neurotic Jack Singer, who, having landed the spectacular Betsy Nolan, can't quite bring himself to pop the question. Every time he gets up the nerve, up pops the specter of his mother, Bea, who, on her deathbed ten years earlier, made Jack promise to never marry.

McClure owns the stage from the opening bars of the first number, "I Love Betsy," in which he joins with most of the population of Brooklyn to sing his girl's praises. ("She likes swimming/Writing letters/She likes watching double-headers/ She drinks bourbon and sake/and even likes Rocky III.") This all-too-rare thing, a genuine charm song, puts us immediately on Jack's side, and a good thing, too, because, a little while later, he turns up in Vegas, fleeced to the tune of $60,000 in a poker game and facing the appalling prospect put putting Betsy up as a marker on his debt.

It's largely thanks to McClure's winning personality that we don't turn on Jack for getting into such a ludicrous jam. Anyway, Andrew Bergman's book, based on his screenplay, takes over from there, putting Jack into an increasingly mortifying series of situations -- chasing the furious Betsy all the way to Hawaii, fighting off an athletic island temptress, undergoing a bizarre form of accelerated therapy, sparring with airline ticket agents who only want to send him to Atlanta, and nursing a case of high anxiety at 30,000 feet on a plane surrounded by Elvis impersonators. With his wiry hair, eyes that easily expand into panic-stricken pools, and a hundred and one nonplussed expressions, McClure is an authentic clown, but he's also plausible when playing romantic leads. It's a golden combination, and here he makes for excellent company.

As Betsy, Brynn O'Malley is willowy, big-voiced, and gifted with a pleasing face that, without warning, can suddenly harden into a mask of determination -- a set of assets that goes a long way toward grounding the book's farcical twists in emotional reality. She makes a big impression in her first number, "Anywhere But Here," in which she sweetly, but firmly, informs Jack that unless he's ready to commit, she's ready to move on. She's a delight when, shopping for a trousseau, she launches into "Betsy's Getting Married." ("Thirty-one years I climbed that hill/Seventeen years I'm on the pill/Lisa Levine's on JDate still/But Betsy's getting wed.") She even makes you believe that Betsy would run off to the tropics with a man she barely knows, if only to prove that she won't be made a fool of.

Perhaps the evening's biggest surprise is Tony Danza, who, as Tommy Korman, the professional gambler who falls hard and fast for Betsy -- she's a ringer for his late wife -- anchors the frantic action with his own particular Rat Pack cool. Tommy will do anything to get his hands on Betsy -- lying, hiring actors to impersonate members of his immediate family -- but, for much of the running time, his manner is so suave, his smile so winning, that you wonder if Betsy might not give him a tumble. Handed one of the score's diciest numbers, "Out of the Sun," Tommy's lament that his wife's sun-worshipping ways ultimately killed her off, he puts it over without breaking a sweat. Later, thinking he has Betsy in the bag, he brings down the house with "A Little Luck," taking time out for a nifty tap break, choreographed by Denis Jones.

Helping matters along is a quartet of solid supporting performances. Nancy Opel has a fine time turning up in the strangest places (including mid-air) and casting maledictions as Bea. Matthew Saldivar has plenty of made-man elan as Tommy's hyper-efficient lieutenant. David Josefsberg scores as an oily lounge singer and the leader of The Flying Elvises, the team of parachutists who help Jack crash Betsy's wedding to Tommy. Catherine is fun as one of Tommy's Hawaiian operatives, who decides that, if she can't sleep with Jack, she will at least break his mother's hold over him. She even manages to enliven the score's second-most-questionable number, a tired collection of double-entendres titled "Friki Friki."

Otherwise, Jason Robert Brown's score is aces; in addition to those mentioned above, there's "When You Say Vegas," a kicky sin-city tribute; the driving first-act closer, "Do Something;" "Higher Love," in which the Flying Elvises rock out before taking the plunge; and the knockout title tune, in which Jack and Betsy realize that true love means embracing your partner's craziness, as well as your own. The orchestrations have an irresistible big-band swing, and the excellent band even gets to jam during the kicky entr'acte.

For the first time, at least in my experience, the set designer Anna Louizos makes extensive use of projections, filling the stage with Brooklyn streetscapes, tropical lanais, and an amusingly rendered Vegas casino/hotel in the Steve Wynn style. Each is so cleverly rendered that's it not easy to tell where the imagery ends and the physical scenery begins. Her biggest coup may be the Flying Elvises' airplane, a convincingly rendered interior with an exterior covered with red, white, and blue LEDs. Since Louizos has provided plenty of wickedly rendered kitsch, Howell Binkley responds with a classy, seamless lighting design that burnishes Louizos' looks without competing with them. The costumes, by Brian Hemesath, include plenty of glitzy showgirl outfits, most notably one for the indelible Sapphire de la Tour, a blonde Amazon who plays the harp with everything but her hands; he also dresses a set of Tiki gods for a bizarre detour into the Hawaiian interior, and he provides a smart wedding dress for Betsy. The sound design, by Scott Lehrer and Drew Levy, lets us hear every word of Brown's clever wordplay and also lets the orchestrations shine.

It's all in fun, a frothy farce blessed with some knockout numbers and three-way star chemistry. This is musical comedy as it used to be, unencumbered by a higher purpose and its silliness salted with plenty of smarts. You can be confident that this Broadway Vegas is far more fun than the real thing.--David Barbour