Theatre in Review: On the Town (Lyric Theatre)

	Clyde Alves, Elizabeth Stanley. Photo: Joan Marcus

It still is a helluva town, after all.

I confess I had grave fears about the new On the Town at the Lyric. For one thing, despite its classic status, it has never been successfully revived. George C. Wolfe's 1998 staging was overwrought, overthought, and fatally lacking in warmth. Ron Field's 1971 production -- with Bernadette Peters, Donna McKechnie, and Phyllis Newman, for God's sake -- only lasted a little over two months. It was additionally distressing to hear that On the Town had been booked into the Lyric, with a seating capacity roughly equivalent to the population of New Jersey. If On the Town looked lost in the Gershwin Theatre back in 1998, what were the chances of preserving its more intimate charms in an even bigger Broadway barn?

From the first downbeat, my fears vanished. John Rando's production captures the fizzing excitement of a show that represented a once-in-a-lifetime explosion of young talents. (Except for the venerable George Abbott, who directed, On the Town was created by a group of artists in their late 20s.) Everyone agrees that the modern musical theatre began in 1943 with Oklahoma! But you can also argue that the Broadway musical acquired its modern sensibility -- its nervous energy, caffeinated humor, and vernacular approach to romance -- from On the Town. And Rando and company -- including a remarkable team of triple-threat performers -- have managed to blow up this casual cartoon, courtesy of librettists and lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green, to the size of a billboard without losing its distinctive coloring. The laughs are all here, along with the surprising vein of melancholia that catches you by surprise and leaves you with a lump in your throat.

Indeed, for a show built on the thinnest of premises -- three sailors in New York for 24 hours, falling in love and getting into trouble -- On the Town is a surprisingly canny piece of construction, each of its plot lines offering a different kind of appeal. For sheer lowdown fun, there's Chip (Jay Armstrong Johnson), the goodhearted yokel with an out-of-date guidebook, who falls happily into the clutches of Brunhilde Esterhazy (Alysha Umphress) -- Hildy to you -- the brass-plated, Brooklyn-voiced cabbie. Chip wants see the sights of New York, while Hildy wants to show him a few sights of her own. ("I like your face," she tells him. "It's kind of open, with nothing in it.") They make a natural comedy team, especially in the number "Come Up to My Place," here staged as a piece of two-reel-comedy slapstick, with Hildy racing the cab up and down Manhattan while Chip tumbles around -- and, occasionally, flies out of -- the moving vehicle. Umphress also sails through the supremely sassy "I Can Cook, Too" -- a number that is only nominally about cuisine -- making the most of every double entendre and scatted note.

For a more high-style form of fooling around, there's Ozzie (Clyde Alves), a goofy charmer who wanders into the Museum of Natural History and into the arms of Claire De Loone (Elizabeth Stanley), a winsome, wild-eyed neurotic ("I was arrested for disorderly conduct at the Frick.") who studies anthropology to keep her mind off men. It's a doomed effort, as we realize in the riotous "Carried Away," in which Claire and Ozzie indulge in pseudo-operatic emoting to express their tragically excessive natures. It's only natural that their duet should climax in laying waste to a dinosaur exhibit.

At the center of the action is the pursuit, by Gabey (Tony Yazbeck), the trio's regular guy, of Ivy Smith (Megan Fairchild), the current Miss Turnstiles. Gabey mistakes Ivy, who is just another show business hopeful, for some kind of reigning Manhattan celebrity, an impression laid out in the witty dance number, "Presentation of Miss Turnstiles." (Among other things, we are told that she is a "frail, flower-like" creature who is also skilled at the javelin throw and shotput.) But, in opposition to the show's other, more farcical mating dances, the romance of Gabey and Ivy is marked by loneliness and yearning -- as expressed in the mood indigo ballad "Lonely Town;" the earnest, upbeat "Lucky to Be Me;" and a pas de deux that feels like a glorious throwback to MGM musicals directed by Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen. Fairchild, a New York City Ballet soloist, isn't experienced in the acting department, but she has a winning personality and is, of course, a total delight when dancing, especially in "Turnstiles," in which she gleefully swans around, trailing various groups of male admirers. Yazbeck has an easy charm that recalls Gene Kelly, with a big voice and a fluent way of moving. Together, they provide the vein of real feeling that makes On the Town's love affairs seem much more than just a day's flirtations.

Barging hilariously through everything is Jackie Hoffman -- she of the hatchet face and four-alarm voice -- mopping up the stage in four different roles. As the dipsomaniacal voice teacher who keeps Ivy on a short leash, she sports a 1920s bobbed haircut and a variety of mismatched clothing items, looking rather like Linda Hunt auditioning for the role of Sally Bowles. ("Sex and art don't mix," she tells Ivy. "If they did, I'd have gone straight to the top.") She is even more delectable as Diana Dream, a nightclub torch singer whose bluesy wailing (in the appropriately titled "I Wish I Was Dead") sounds like a mother basset hound calling her offspring back home. Michael Rupert is assigned the show's most thankless role, as Pitkin W. Bridgework, Claire's eternally cuckolded stuffed-shirt fiancé, but he earns some honest laughs with his constantly reprised number "I Understand." Allison Guinn makes a strong impression as Lucy Schmeeler, Hildy's adenoidal roommate and professional wet blanket. The big-voiced Phillip Boykin rattles the rafters as a dock worker in the opening number, "I Feel Like I'm Not Out of Bed Yet."

And then there is Leonard Bernstein's score, one of the four or five best in the entire Broadway canon. It is astonishing in its abundance -- jazzy, hepcat ditties and wicked pop-tune parodies sitting side by side with sweeping, Aaron Copland-esque orchestral flourishes and heart-struck ballads. Bernstein seemingly poured everything he knew about New York -- the crowds, traffic jams, incessant construction, nonstop chatter, and sheer nervous energy -- into the music, offering one electrifying melody after another. The opportunity to hear it performed by an orchestra of some two dozen musicians is reason enough to attend On the Town.

Joshua Bergasse's witty choreography draws on the style of the show's original choreographer, Jerome Robbins -- whose ballet, Fancy Free, inspired On the Town -- to fill the stage with high-kicking sailors; sending a strutting, manly football team chasing after Ivy; arranging tableaux of world-weary socialites in Gabey's fantasy of Coney Island as a playground of the rich; and deploying seedy cooch dancers in a carnival attraction. Even in the most elaborate numbers, his style is clear and direct -- a simple leg extension followed by a quarter-turn is all he needs to suggest that Gabey is possessed with longing. Rando's direction employs a variety of strategies to defeat the sheer size of the theatre. A small forestage projecting into the house is used for a number of solos, bringing the singers right into the audience. Sometimes the action spills over into the auditorium. In "Carried Away," Claire steps off the stage to try to seize the baton away from the conductor. A chorus of lost souls roams the auditorium in "Lonely Town," drawing us into the song's introspective mood.

Given the task of creating a cascade of locations, the set designer, Beowulf Boritt, takes the old-school approach, using a variety of drops and small, cutaway sets to fill the stage with dockyards, subways, museums, apartments, Battery Park, Coney Island, and three different nightclubs, plus fantasy sequences. (A few discreetly realized projection sequences are employed, most notably in "Come Up to My Place;" there is also a clever subway effect, which uses projections to arrange a shift of perspective in mid-scene.) Jason Lyons' lighting carves out the dance numbers with sidelight, creating gorgeous color washes behind the fantasy dance numbers. He also enlivens the Coney Island sequences with bold splashes of color. Jess Goldstein works a variety of mid-1940s styles, cutting them for maximum sexiness and making them pop with bright Crayola hues. Working in a theatre once described to me by a sound designer as "an unqualified sonic disaster," Kai Harada provides a design that is a model of clarity, allowing the show's abundance of big voices to reach throughout the house. This is by far the best sound design I've experience in this theatre.

One reason often suggested why On the Town has struggled in past revivals is that it is a structural oddity, blending music that is grand enough for a symphony hall and long passages of ballet with broadly comic sketches and numbers. (Comden and Green had only recently emerged from the Village Vanguard, where they worked as professional cutups with Judy Holliday in an act called The Revuers.) But Rando has found a way to knit them all into a seamless whole, so much so that it seems only inevitable when we arrive at "Some Other Time," in which the couples acknowledge with a shrug of quiet resignation that love is fleeting and the future is unknown. You won't forget the final image, of three new sailors, bursting with energy and ready for their day on the town, while Hildy, Claire, and Ivy wave goodbye to the men they have had only a day to love. On the Town is a riot, filled with melody, and, when you aren't looking, it sneaks up on you and delivers an emotional wallop. What more could you want from a musical?--David Barbour