Grand Hotel the Musical – Encores! – New York City Center

Brandon Uranowitz and Heléne Yorke in the Encores! production of Grand Hotel at New York City Center. Picture: Joan Marcus

Grand Hotel the Musical, an Encores! production, played New York City Center.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Things don’t go too grandly for the inhabitants of Grand Hotel the Musical. They’re variously faced with heavy debt, murderous threats from creditors, fading and imperiled careers, and fatal disease.

Nevertheless, the opulent six-performance revival of this 1989 musical – courtesy of the invaluable Encores! series at New York City Center – was indeed a reason for rejoicing. It provided nearly two hours of virtually non-stop, thrillingly dark musical theatre.

When the show first opened on Broadway nearly three decades ago, it was hailed as a triumph of showmanship over content, a testament to the theatrical creativity of its director-choreographer Tommy Tune.

The frailty of its content was recognised early by Tune with the production’s out-of-town tryouts. He called in a former collaborator, composer-lyricist Maury Yeston (of Nine and Titanic fame) to refurbish and add to the score by Robert Wright and George Forrest. There was also pushing and pulling on the book by Luther Davis.

All the reworking did not stop the critical harrumphing about the weakness of the material when the show finally opened on Broadway, but however, it was a hit. It ran for more than 1,000 performances and pulled in five Tony Award wins out of 12 nominations.

And now, this Encores! revival suggested that time has lent the score and book an endearing patina. Its intertwining stories among the inhabitants of the luxurious Berlin refuge paint a resonant portrait of a society, from scullery workers to corporate nabobs and nobility, dancing on a precipice as the Jazz Age in 1928 heads toward its catastrophic climax. After all, the 1929 Vicki Baum novel, which provided the original source, has withstood several iterations, most famously, the starry 1932 MGM movie.

And with expectations eased, the score can be appreciated for its echoes of and borrowings from the sounds of Weimar Germany – or more precisely early Kurt Weill – and the soaring aspirations of its classic Broadway balladry. The original orchestrations by Peter Matz, played with panache by the 25-member orchestra conducted by Rob Berman, gave the melodies both a lushness and nerve-grabbing intensity.

All this, together with the invigorating staging of director-choreographer Josh Rhodes, following much of the Tommy Tune template, and a vibrant cast afforded the musical another chance for evaluation. Rhodes kept the chorus moving in arresting patterns, sometimes brightly stepping in ballroom fashion, other times locked together forebodingly as signals of fate.

Among the key performances, Brandon Uranowitz palpably – and infectiously – savoured the plum role of Otto Kringelein, the seriously ill bookkeeper who has squirrelled away his life’s earnings and is now ready to blow them for a first and final fling at life at the Grand Hotel. As in the original production, ‘We’ll Take a Glass Together’, in which Kringelein cuts loose with a wobbly-legged Charleston, was a guaranteed showstopper.

James Snyder brought an easy gallantry to Baron Felix Von Gaigern, a playboy up to his neck in debt and being pushed into crime to pay it off. He also aired some heroic vocalising in the show’s big ballad, ‘Love Can’t Happen’, and the climactic ‘Roses at the Station’.

As Elizaveta Grushinskaya, the prima ballerina whose career is on the skids, Irina Dvorovenko exuded a despairing haughtiness that burst into Piaf-like ecstasy with ‘Bonjour Amour’ once she discovers life-changing love with the Baron. Natascia Diaz did some lustrous singing as Elizaveta’s dedicated companion, who does not dare reveal the depth of her affection.

The heart-tugging but buoyant Flaemmchen, the typist and movie star wannabe, was embodied with zesty flapper attitude and more than a bit of tired soul by Heléne Yorke. Her character-defining number ‘Girl in the Mirror’ – contrasting her dreams of Hollywood with her depressing existence in her tenement flat – took on near-epic proportions.

The atmosphere was further defined by John Dossett as Preysing, the business tycoon deep in deceit to save his job, and William Ryall as a morphine-addicted doctor, haunted by memories of the First World War.

Preysing’s brutal lust for Flammchen played like a page right out of the #MeToo playbook, while Ryall’s doctor served up mordant diagnoses on the happenings in the hotel. Ryall should certainly know the territory; he was in the original Broadway production, playing one of the scullery workers.

There wee brighter mood enhancers from James T. Lane and Daniel Yearwood as jazzy singing-and-dancing bartenders and John Clay III as the front desk clerk worried about his hospitalised wife going through a difficult birth.

And finally, there is the expressionistic capper, the Bolero, breathtakingly danced by Junior Cervila and Guadalupe Garcia, performed as a battle between Love and Death. What else?

Physically, the production was one of the most elaborate ever mounted by Encores!, whose province is concert versions of past musicals. The 30 cast members were clothed in luxurious period costumes by Linda Cho. As in the original Broadway staging, Allen Moyer’s dramatic set design had the orchestra high on a second level.

The Encores! set was also centered by a steep, red-carpeted staircase, with a huge mirror at the top. But don’t worry. The moody lighting by Ken Billington and the ominous music made sure you didn’t mistake it for the red carpeted staircase in Dolly Levi’s Harmonia Gardens.

Rather all these lavish trappings attest to the apparent conviction of the Encores! keepers of the purse strings that this Grand Hotel deserved to be grand indeed.

Ron Cohen