Review: Mighty Music Carries SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER at PMT

If you have good memories of Saturday Night Fever, I'd be willing to bet you have good memories of the soundtrack, or of the iconic white-suit-and-pointing-hand image on the cover of said soundtrack. If we're being generous, maybe you've got good memories of John Travolta's dancing. The sad truth is, Saturday Night Fever never really comes together as a movie when watched in the present without nostalgia goggles. It's an awkward blend of extended dance sequences and New Hollywood touches- less Footloose than Rocky but with disco dancing instead of boxing matches. Luckily, the movie has an incredible double album for a soundtrack, which serves as arguably the greatest disco record of the 1970s. (I would say of all time, but Daft Punk's Random Access Memories in 2013 may have been better.) This kind of middling material will never produce a great stage show, but thanks to energetic performances and a truly astounding band, PMT's production of Saturday Night Fever enlivens its source material.

Much like the film, the musical focuses on charming young loser Tony Manero (Anthony Crouchelli), an Italian Catholic nobody with a gift for disco and line dancing. Like Rocky Balboa, whose poster he idolizes, Tony is aimless, affable, not that bright and certainly not politically correct- he and his friends repeatedly express latent racism towards Hispanics, and he berates his former dance partner and lover Annette (Jenny Malarkey) to decide if she's "a nice girl or a slut." Tony spends his days working a dead-end job in a hardware store, and his nights either peeing off bridges with his maybe-street-gang The Faces, or dancing up a storm in the local disco, overseen by flamboyant DJ Monty (Jonathan Visser) and house-band vocalist Candy (Amanda Foote). Only when he meets, and promptly falls for, upwardly mobile office worker and dancer Stephanie (Larissa Overholt) does his life begin to change, though not necessarily for the better.

Anthony Crouchelli sings and dances beautifully in the title role, assisted by Lisa Elliott's demanding choreography, but he is hindered by the character he has to play. Tony is a cipher, wandering through a mundane realist drama without making many definitive moves or choices. Larissa Overholt comes off better as his partner- her character has more depth simply because of her assertive nature. Overholt, served much better here than by her material in last season's The Little Mermaid, does the improbable in making a likeable character out of a slightly snobbish, icy woman rightly characterized by Tony's working-poor friends as "kind of a bitch."

The leading ladies, from Overholt to Amanda Foote and Jenny Malarkey, all sing and dance well, but none are given the same quality of material as Overholt. Both Candy and Annette are given almost absurd slow-jam versions of upbeat disco tunes- "Nights on Broadway" for Candy and "If I Can't Have You" for Annette. Foote's searing vocal lifts "Nights on Broadway," when coupled with a fantastic late-night sax solo, but though Malarkey commits to the material, "If I Can't Have You" doesn't work as a moment of pathos. One of my favorite Pittsburgh actors, Jonathan Visser, has the opposite problem: he has a preponderance of good material and great songs, but is somewhat miscast in a poorly conceived role as both charismatic DJ and bandleader. Visser is a brilliant character actor, as his turns in Jacques Brel and Judge Jackie Justice will show. But for all his successes, he is not a powerhouse soul singer, and no one short of a Tituss Burgess could successfully embody both the flamboyant, jive-spitting DJ and the huge, dramatic voice the disco hits demand. Nonetheless, he milks his comic moments with aplomb, including a single stage cross where his lanky height is amplified to cartoon-character effect by platform shoes and a towering Jewfro.

Some of the best performances in the show are by non-singing characters. Improv comedian Brett Goodnack, familiar to regulars at the Arcade Theatre, brings genuine emotion and drama to the character of Frank Jr., a defrocked priest not entirely able to give up his pastoral role as easily as he gave up his collar. Two PMT regulars not given large roles in this production, Tom Kolos and Brady Patsy, make the most of single-appearance cameos as a patronizing townie and a nun, respectively.

The true star of this production, without a doubt, is the top-notch band, one of the best I have ever heard for a show in Pittsburgh. The classic horn charts, Nile Rodgers guitar funk and tinkling electric pianos of the disco era are reproduced in full living color, and the saxophone and guitar work alone are worth the price of admission. Though Saturday Night Fever may never make for a satisfying evening of intelligent theatre, it makes for one hell of a musical revue (especially since the final bow is not given to Tony, nor any of the lead actors, but the dance soloists), and judged by those standards, PMT has a definite hit on its hands.

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