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Theatrical Double-Feature Feature: White Christmas Edition

I don’t usually do double-feature features for live theater, because, well, you can’t generally see them as double features. But if you’re in the New York area this weekend, don’t mind a little schlepping around, and want a perfectly matched pair of plays, with a seasonal hook to boot, allow me to make a pair […]
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I don’t usually do double-feature features for live theater, because, well, you can’t generally see them as double features. But if you’re in the New York area this weekend, don’t mind a little schlepping around, and want a perfectly matched pair of plays, with a seasonal hook to boot, allow me to make a pair of recommendations.

First, tonight, go to the Lyric Theater on Broadway and take in On The Town, the Comden and Green confection about three lonely sailors on a day’s leave in New York. I was somewhat apprehensive about the show going in, most particularly because I love the film version, and I was pretty sure the stage version would suffer by comparison, if only because how are you going to beat Gene Kelly and Anne Miller, Betty Garrett and Frank Sinatra (and no knock intended on the rest of the cast). I also worried that the stage show would seem dated, as previous revivals are reported to have been, which the film – perhaps because of that star power, perhaps because it is embedded in history, not being revived in our time – never does, at least to me.

I needn’t have worried. The great thing about On The Town is that the show is as frank as a contemporary sex comedy but without the  adolescent impulse to show off that frankness to hide the deeper insecurity, the pose of cynicism that so cripples that genre today. These are just three guys with 24 hours to find girls – strangers, women they’ll most likely never see again. And so what? The girls are just as plainly itching for someone to come and show them a good time – and there are no nagging social conventions to be overcome, just the difficulty of actually connecting in such a short time, given human nature and the complexity of the city.

That’s not a dated situation, and those aren’t dated feelings, any more than youth itself is dated. And because this production simply lets them run, and sets its dances and other set pieces to its natural galloping pace, it has a feeling of youthfulness not too many revivals manage – and not too many contemporary shows either.

I still missed certain bits from the film – Anne Miller’s knockout dance number in particular – and I think the film makes a better meal of Lucy Schmeeler’s character than does the stage show. But Alysha Umphress and Jay Armstrong Johnson took definitive ownership of Hildy (as a belter with an all-about-that-bass figure) and Chip (as a remarkably acrobatic nerd) respectively, Megan Fairchild was incandescent as Gabey’s love-object Ivy Smith, and Jackie Hoffman served up well-seasoned slices of ham in multiple comic roles. And most especially, we get back two beautiful songs lost in the transition to film, Gabey’s lament, “Lonely Town,” and his song of anticipation, “Lucy To Be Me,” both sung with true feeling by Tony Yazbeck.

Then, tomorrow, head to Madison, New Jersey to take in the final performances of Much Ado About Nothing, in a production directed by and starring Scott Wentworth (opposite his wife, Marion Adler, as Beatrice) that borrows the sentimental feelings we still have about the era of On The Town to warm the sometimes frosty heart of Shakespeare’s classic romantic comedy.

This Much Ado is set World War II at Christmastime. The lights come up on Wentworth’s lonely G.I. listlessly peeling potatoes, and finally nodding off to Bing Crosby warbling “White Christmas” on a radio. As he falls asleep, the stage is transformed, Nutcracker-like – a tiny tree is replaced by a full-sized specimen, the dark frozen barracks becomes a decked-out ballroom, and the grunt himself goes from private to colonel. And then Shakespeare’s play begins – with the promoted G.I. as Benedick.

The conceit works grandly. Much Ado is very close in spirit to the romantic comedies of the 1940s, as is the fantasy of an ordinary G.I. placing himself in a scene from such a movie. The transposition is particularly helpful to the Claudio-Hero plot: layering the stylization of Hollywood’s Golden Age over the stylization of Shakespeare ironically makes that plot more approachable than it often does. We know how to read it, and that we’re not supposed to simply turn on Claudio (though credit also has to go to Charles Pasternak’s earnest performance for that achievement as well). And the final wedding scene may have had a specific filmic referent; at all events, it prompted my wife to lean over to me and whisper, “positively the same dame!”

That layer of stylization is also helpful to Beatrice, fully inhabited by Adler as a ’40s leading lady – Irene Dunn’s sensuality, but with Kate Hepburn’s steel and fire mixed in. (I admit to having teared up along with her at the first announcement of Hero and Claudio’s nuptials.) And the lampoon of Dogberry (Jeffrey Bender) and the rest of the watch benefits greatly from turning them into the local branch of Civil Defense.

And when Shakespeare’s play is done, the costumes come off, and our dreaming G.I. returns to his cold barracks. And “White Christmas” is still playing. And if that’s a moment that trades on nostalgia – for our cinematic memories of World War II if not the real thing – well, for once nostalgia works, even on me.

On The Town plays at the Lyric Theater in New York in an open run. Much Ado About Nothing plays at the Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey through December 28th.

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