The Band Wagon – Encores! – New York City Center, New York

Brian Stokes Mitchell and Tony Sheldon in The Band Wagon, an Encores! Special Event at the New York City Center, New York. Picture: Joan Marcus

The Band Wagon continues as an Encores! Special Event at New York City Center, New York until 16 November.

‘That’s Entertainment’, the Arthur Schwartz-A Dietz ode to theatrical storytelling, is practically synonymous with the classic 1953 movie musical, The Band Wagon, where the song was first heard. And the new stage adaptation of The Band Wagon, being presented as a Special Event of the Off-Broadway Encores! series, lives up to the song’s title. It is, above all else, entertaining, if not thoroughly satisfying.

Of course, any stage version of The Band Wagon starts off with an almost insurmountable handicap: it’s going to be compared by much – if not most – of the audience to one of the most beguiling and sophisticated film musicals ever made. But the Encores! people have certainly piled on the assets to give their production a formidable luster.

First of all, there’s Brian Stokes Mitchell, one of the most ingratiating musical theatre talents around these days, in the leading role of Tony Hunter, a movie star trying to revive a collapsed career by appearing in a Broadway show. It’s a role immortalised on screen by Fred Astaire, but Mitchell endows it with his own star quality: a terrifically engaging manner bolstered by a beautifully robust baritone. He even shows off a nifty thing or two in tap shoes in the big dance number that serves as the finale.

Furthermore, Mitchell is surrounded by a quartet of imposing above-the-title names: Tracey Ullman, Michael McKean, Tony Sheldon and Laura Osnes. Ullman and McKean play the man-and-wife team turning out the words and music, respectively, for the Broadway show in which Hunter is gambling for his future. Sheldon, an Australian who won over Broadway audiences with his Tony Award-nominated work in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, is Jeffrey Cordova, the British director who wants to turn the musical into impenetrable high art. Osnes, most recently the title lady in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, portrays Gabrielle Gerard, the modern dancer who will be making her Broadway debut as the leading lady in Tony’s show.

Guiding them all is Kathleen Marshall, who has climbed to the top rung of current Broadway director-choreographers with such shows as Nice Work If You Can Get It, Anything Goes and The Pajama Game. 

Then, there are the abiding virtues of the piece itself: the songs by composer Schwartz and lyricist Dietz. The signature song, ‘That’s Entertainment’, was written for the movie, but the others are drawn from the Schwartz-Dietz catalogue which stretches from 1929 to the early 1960s. The score includes such familiar ballads as ‘Dancing in the Dark’, ‘I’ll Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan’ and ‘By Myself’, as well as such novelty numbers as the terrific ‘Triplets’ and ‘I Love Louisa’. The songs from the movie have also been augmented with others Schwartz-Dietz oeuvre, most  notably ‘Something to Remember You By’. They are all rendered impeccably by the show’s principals and ensemble players and given rich arrangements by the orchestra under music director Todd Ellison. The orchestra with 12 musicians is smaller than the usual Encores! contingent, but still sounds great.

Marshall’s staging and dances are always agreeable, and sometimes damned exciting, especially in that aforementioned finale, done to ‘A Shine On Your Shoes’. (Yes, it does look a lot like the climactic number she created for the title song in Anything Goes, but so be it. It still makes you want to jump out of your seat.)

So, why didn’t I sit back and just enjoy the show, without visions of Astaire, Jack Buchanan, Cyd Charisse, Nanette Fabray and Oscar Levant and the other inhabitants of that 1953 Vincent Minnelli masterwork dancing in my head? I  guess one big reason is the book by Douglas Carter Beane, which wants to unnecessarily convince us that it knows a lot about showbusiness, with its tired inside jokes (When told Gabrielle is the girlfriend of the show’s choreographer, Tony muses: “In my day, choreographers didn’t have girlfriends.”) and oblique references (Hunter asks an always-ready to-help assistant: “Is there anything you don‘t do?” The assistant replies: “Strindberg.”)

Beane also has thickened up the story by adding a past romance between the Ullman character, Lilly, and Tony Hunter. Supposedly, this element was in the original screenplay by the inimitable Betty Comden and Adolph Green, but excised from the movie’s final cut. Here, though, it seems contrived and heavy, although it does give the incredibly talented Ullman a chance to sing an obscure torch song, ‘I Still Look At You That Way’.

Of course, I should admit that I’ve sat through the movie The Band Wagon more times than is probably healthy, and any variation was liable to jar my consciousness. Even so, there were moments when I was willing to let the memory of it slip away and just concentrate on what was happening on stage. Those moments usually involved Sheldon as the egotistical director blessed with irresistible panache. And when he joined Mitchell in the white-tie-and-tails duet to ‘I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan’, it was bliss.

With a lot of tightening and some script work, this version of The Band Wagon could boast many more such moments and might well roll on into a Broadway future, following in the tracks of such other Encores! efforts as Chicago and Cotton Club Parade, renamed After Midnight.

Ron Cohen 

 www.nycitycenter.org

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