Review - Take Me Along - Flora, The Red Menace - Fabulous Divas of Broadway

1959 was a heck of a good year for Broadway overtures. The majestic trumpet fanfare and lowdown bump and grind of Gypsy's is generally regarded as the best in musical theatre, but there was also the rousingly rhythmic curtain-raiser to Fiorello! and, my personal favorite, Philip J. Lang's beautiful interpretation of Bob Merrill's music for Take Me Along, which touches on so many moods of the show while continually building the toe-tapping climax of The catchy title tune.

Of course, I wasn't expecting a full orchestra playing Lang's arrangements as I arrived at the Irish Repertory Theatre for their scaled-down version of Merrill (who also wrote the lyrics), Joseph Stein and Robert Russell's (co-bookwriters) adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's warm family comedy of 1920 Connecticut, Ah, Wilderness!, but music director Mark Hartman's zippy 4-piece ensemble, appropriately sounding like a band that might be gathered up to play at a rural 4th of July festival, was perfectly suited to director Charlotte Moore's charming little production of a very underappreciated musical.

Competing for customers with hits like Redhead, The Sound of Music, Destry Rides Again and Bye, Bye, Birdie, as well as the aforementioned Fiorello! and Gypsy, Take Me Along ran for a year on the strength of its Tony-winning star, Jackie Gleason, closing shortly after he left the show and was replaced by William Bendix. Kurt Knudsen got a Tony nomination for playing the Gleason role in a 1985 revival which transferred from the Goodspeed Opera House and closed in one night, but Take Me Along is really a much better show than its reputation may suggest. Its duo love story contrasting the idealistic excitement of young love with the mellower experience of later-years romance is worked into a well-crafted, gently humorous book with a score that features a couple of hidden-gem ballads, good character songs and a couple of top-notch comedy numbers.

For The Irish Rep, Don Stephenson, an angular comic best known as a long-term Leo Bloom during the Broadway run of The Producers, takes on the leading role of Sid Davis, the gregarious newspaper reporter whose drunken binges get in the way of his attempts to romance his brother's sister-in-law, the prim schoolteacher, Lily (Beth Glover). Stephenson's abundance of physical and vocal shtick is all nicely character-driven, being funny but serving as a reminder of Sid's arrested adolescence. Glover has a lovely, warm voice and her ballads are a highlight of the evening.

Teddy Eck, as Sid and Lily's lovesick 17-year-old nephew Richard, and Emily Skeggs, as the girl he romances with quotes from Omar Khayyam and Oscar Wilde, have their funny and sweet scenes, as do William Parry (another splendid singing voice) and Donna Bullock as the married siblings of Sid and Lily (and Richard's parents). Anastasia Barzee is also winning as a dance hall girl who leads the chorus in the rousing drinking song, "If Jesus Don't Love Ya," a number added to the show after the Broadway production.

The small stage is splashed with color from James Morgan's pen and ink set designs showing the bustling town of Centerville and Linda Fisher's period costumes are just dandy.

While it's great to have fresh new musicals that take interesting risks, Take Me Along is a fine example of the sunny enjoyment to that can be found with some of the lesser-known old-fashioned ones.

Photo by Carol Rosegg: Emily Skeggs and Teddy Eck

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And while I'm on the subject of small-scale revivals of underappreciated musicals, you have only one more chance (tonight at 7) to see the Opening Doors Theatre Company's terrific staging of Flora, The Red Menace. Though this valentine to the buoyant enthusiasm of 1930s New Yorkers who thought Communism was the way to get American out of the depression had a book by director George Abbott when it premiered on Broadway in 1965, Opening Doors uses the revised book by David Thompson (the only version of the show that's licensed) which ran Off-Broadway in 1987 and is closer in spirit to what the composer John Kander, lyricist Fred Ebb and producer Harold Prince had in mind before deferring to Abbott's desire to make it a more conventional musical comedy. (Among other differences of opinion, Abbott didn't think Communists could depicted as sympathetic.)

Fitting nine actors and a piano on the cabaret stage of The Duplex (which has only one backstage entrance/exit) is not easy feat but director SuzAnne Adams and choreographer Christine Schwalenberg keep the proceedings crisp and peppy. The strong-singing (Ray Baily is music director), enthusiastic cast is a pleasure from top to bottom. Desiree Davar and Francis Kelly are endearingly quirky as the wide-eyed, idealistic Flora and her stuttering, Communist activist boyfriend, Harry. Alison Renee Foster has plenty of pizzazz as the femme fatal rabble-rouser, Charlotte, while Erin West and Kevin Michael Murphy are perfectly charming as a young tap-dancing couple. Andrew Lebon, Jillian Prefach, Buzz Roddy and Kevin C. Wanzor are all enjoyable in their various roles.

Photo: Desiree Davar and Francis Kelly

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Early on in his self-written and directed solo show, Fabulous Divas of Broadway, Alan Palmer explains that his performances as Patti LuPone, Ethel Merman, Chita Rivera, Carol Channing, Andrea McArdle et al. are not intended to be impressions but are meant to show the impressions these performers made in his life. Okay, fair enough. Except the evening never seems to have any purpose beyond seeing a fellow who, even in C. Buckley's perfectly fine costumes and wigs, looks too much like a guy in a dress doing rudimentary impersonations that might look cute if executed by a 15-year-old. In between renditions of "The Boy Next Door," "Ring Them Bells," "I'm The Greatest Star," etcetera, etcetera and so forth (music director Curtis Jerome is at piano) we hear about the first Broadway show he saw (Annie), a road trip he took to see Anything Goes (LuPone was out that night) and his experiences singing and dancing on a dinner/cruise ship.

Audiences members are brought up to play a round of "Name That Diva," where the contestant who can name the most divas by their signature tunes ("Till There Was You," "Whatever Lola Wants"...) gets to wear a feather boa. Later on the audience is invited to call out words for a "Mad Libs" style rewrite of "What I Did For Love." The night I attended the crowd shouted nouns like "dildo," "rehab" and "crack pipe." When Palmer asked for a verb a sweet elderly lady's voice suggested "ejaculate." The big finale involves a group of boys brought up to be back-up dancers for the title number from Hello, Dolly! but that routine barely gets started before it's over.

Palmer comes off as a nice guy who loves musicals and loves the great ladies of Broadway, but - and I'm trying hard not to sound like an elitist New Yorker here - his show is too Broadway 101 to be playing in the heart of the theatre district, across the street from Don't Tell Mama, a cabaret space that many of this town's top diva impersonators have called home. If his performance isn't supposed to be about impressions, it has to be about something. But I felt nothing.

Photo by Josef Reiter: Alan Palmer as Liza Minnelli