Cabin in the Sky – Encores! – New York City Center

Michael Potts and LaChanze in Cabin in the Sky
at the New York City Center. Picture: Joan Marcus

Cabin in the Sky, an Encores! production, at New York City Center.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

For reasons perhaps now known only to the musical theatre gods, Cabin in the Sky, when it opened in 1940, was only a moderate success. The critics pretty much liked it, and its African-American cast was stuffed with luminous names. At the top of the bill were Ethel Waters, Katherine Dunham, Todd Duncan, Dooley Wilson and Rex Ingram. The score by composer Vernon Duke and lyricist John Latouche was zestful, and guiding it all was the matchless choreographer/director George Balanchine. But the show ran for just a middling 156 performances. A 1943 movie version, which kept Ethel Waters in the lead role, was a solid musical in its own right, but did away with a lot of the original score.

In a conscientiously reconstructed production opening this year’s three-show season of Encores! at New York City Center, Cabin in the Sky emerged as a totally beguiling concoction. The book by Lynn Root – in a ‘concert adaptation’ by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who directed the show, and Jack Viertel, Encores! artistic director – is fairly simplistic. (In Encores! jargon, concert adaptation means fairly minimal but sometimes quite handsome production values, and on occasion, rare occasions, an actor might carry a script.)

Set in America’s rural south, the story has emissaries of Hell and Heaven fighting to claim the soul of ‘Little Joe’ Jackson, who has been mortally wounded in a fracas over a dice game.

Joe is a really nice guy, who just happens to have a penchant for gambling and a wayward eye. He also has a devoted and devout wife, Petunia, whose ardent prayers gain Joe a six-month reprieve to right his ways. As the forces of darkness, led by Lucifer Junior, and the forces of light, led by the Lord’s General, sit enthroned on opposite sides of the stage, we witness what transpires during those fateful six months.

Will Joe stay on the straight and narrow or will he succumb to temptation, the main temptation being a voluptuous lady named Georgia Brown, with whom he once had a fling? Even with its prefabricated plotting, the story exudes a wit and charm that give it more than a fable-like validity, and Duke’s music elevates it further with a surprising sophistication.

The original orchestrations have been lost. Only a piano score remained, and with the help of a special fund, the celebrated orchestrator Jonathan Tunick created new settings that brilliantly showed off both Duke’s deep musicality and the show’s 30-plus member orchestra, under the direction of Rob Berman.

Tunick’s work alternated between a symphonic lushness and a driving force redolent of big band swing of the 1930s and 40s. There was also a couple of big a cappella arrangements of traditional gospel chorales that lent a coating of authenticity as well.

Encores! had furthermore put together a cast that may well rival the original. As Petunia, LaChanze had a charm that deliciously underpinned the ethereal with a spunky earthiness, just as her singing layered a creamy seductiveness over knockout power. Her voice filled the cavernous City Center auditorium effortlessly in such numbers as ‘Taking a Chance on Love’, the score’s lilting and most well-known standard; ‘Love Turned the Light Out’, a moody classically-tinged torch song, and the melodic title song.

Other highlights were her quietly joyous rendering of ‘Happiness is a Thing Called Joe’, a classic ballad not in the original score but written for the movie by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg, and her sexy strutting through the Latin rhythms of the big production number ‘Savannah’.

Michael Potts made an extremely likeable Little Joe, giving an unassuming macho tinge to his feelings for Petunia and deftly teaming with LaChanze and Carly Hughes’ Georgia Brown in several duets. Hughes also shines in her own solo, with the enticing ‘Honey in the Honeycomb’.

As the duelling forces of the supernatural, Chuck Cooper, playing the devil’s own son, and Norm Lewis, embodying the General of the Lord, were formidable presences. Cooper was delightfully devilish, and Lewis unobtrusively assured in the power of goodness. And they both proved their mettle as Broadway-style song and dance men, Cooper with the bouncy ‘Do What You Wanna Do’ and Lewis with the more reserved but playful ‘It’s Not So Bad to Be Good’.

Another asset was the dynamic choreography of Camille A. Brown. She excitingly seasoned Broadway bounce with an insinuating Afro-Cuban flavour – reminiscent of the work of Katherine Dunham, who was uncredited in sharing choreographic duties with Balanchine in the original mounting.

And finally, director Santiago-Hudson expertly melded all this creative outpouring into his large and extremely talented ensemble, creating a fairly seamless and always delectable entertainment. Regretfully, it was on display, as is Encores! wont, for a mere seven performances.

Ron Cohen 

www.nycitycenter.org/Home/On-Stage/Encores!