Smokey Joe’s Café – Stage 42, New York

John Edwards, Jelani Remy, Dwayne Cooper and Kyle Taylor Parker in Smokey Joe’s Cafe at Stage 42, New York. Picture: Julia Russell

Smokey Joe’s Café continues at Stage 42, New York.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

The songs of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller might not have all the dewy freshness they had back in the 1950s and 1960s when the songwriting team was contributing mightily to the soundtrack of our lives.

Now those songs have morphed into vintage souvenirs of the last vestiges of the Tin Pan Alley era. That was when creators of words and music gathered in such places as New York’s Brill Building and churned out hopeful hits for the legions of pop singers of the day. That was before the rise of the singer-songwriters and their brethren rappers, who together with the internet turned the music business upside down.

Still, the ditties Leiber and Stoller wrote and co-wrote with others still manage to whip up an exhilarating jolt of recognition and pleasure that’s more than nostalgia. They also provide a legitimate raison d’être for Smokey Joe’s Café, the 1995 Broadway revue spotlighting their catalogue and now getting a top-notch revival Off-Broadway.

The success of the original production speaks for itself. It ran for nearly five years, becoming the longest-running musical revue in Broadway history. Whether this remounting will duplicate that type of endurance remains to be seen. But there’s no denying the affection and talent that has been lavished on this revival. Its four top producers produced the original, and the show bears all the earmarks of a celebration for a favoured child.

Director-choreographer Joshua Bergasse, whose choreography charged the recent revival of On the Town and the New York redo of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, has infused the proceedings with a sense of joy that ripples through the superlative nine-person company of five men and four women.

The performers are gathered in the pub of the title, richly realised in Beowulf Boritt’s set design and Jeff Croiter’s lighting, and the show starts with a wistful rendering of the song ‘Neighbourhood’, suggesting a sense of community. Later some songs about travel, such as ‘Keep on Rollin’’ and ‘Kansas City’, are grouped together, but there’s no strongly discernible narrative theme.

Rather it’s that sense of joy – performers enjoying their material, enjoying each other and enjoying it all with an audience – that provides the context. And the surprising variety of the songs themselves gives them a plentitude of opportunities to win over the audience, whether its taste be chugging rock‘n’roll (‘Searchin’’), passionate laments (‘I Keep Forgettin’’), comedy stuff (‘Along Came Jones’, ‘Little Egypt’) or those iconic anthems (‘I’m a Woman’, ‘Stand By Me’).

And still more… With 40 numbers in all, including a few reprises, there is indeed probably something for everybody. Or almost everybody. Some people are going to complain about the lack of substantive connective tissue, or the unapologetic commercial/pop nature of a lot of the material. Well, you can’t please ’em all.

Among the highlights are the several times that four of the guys – Dwayne Cooper, John Edwards, Kyle Taylor Parker and Jelani Remy – join together to replicate the vocal harmony groups of yore, only with the choreography revved up exponentially. Bergasse finds innumerable variations on the syncopated movement that marked those groups, and he fills the routines with unexpected humour.

There’s also some gorgeous doo-wap when the four men back up Max Sangerman’s smooth rendering of ‘Loving You’.

In climactic solos, Edwards tears a passion to glorious tatters in Leiber and Stoller’s translation of the Italian cri de coeur ‘I Who Have Nothing’, while on the distaff side, Nicole Vanessa Ortiz does the same with ‘Fools Fall in Love’. A quieter pathos marks Alysha Umphress’ delineation of ‘Pearl’s a Singer’, the tale of an aspiring singer who never made it.

In another mood, Ortiz and Umphress join with the other two women – Emma Degerstedt and Dionne D. Figgins – for a rousing ‘I’m a Woman’.

Dance takes the spotlight a number of times, with Degerstedt turning a rippling red mini dress into perpetual motion in ‘Teach Me How to Shimmy’, while Figgins is sinuously seductive in ‘Spanish Harlem’. The unbounded athleticism of Remy turns ‘Jailhouse Rock’ into a showstopper, and a determinedly upbeat ‘On Broadway’ has the male quartet vibrating with choreographic hijinks, while their sequined lapels glow in the strips of red neon light that suddenly define the stage.

Then, there are the times when the whole company, clothed in Alejo Vietti’s colorful atmospheric costumes, dance their way into the audience, the seven musicians, most of them ensconced in the wings for most of the show, slide into full view, and the whole place explodes into party mode.

And if you abstain from the cocktails being sold in the lobby, you can even enjoy this party at Smokey Joe’s Café without the threat of a hangover.

Ron Cohen