©New York Times
Nov. 4, 2001


Cole Porter With Joy And Glee
By Alvin Klein

True believers dream on, wishing for a renaissance of the American musical, our theater's indigenous art form. At the least, they look forward to revivals.

But since musicals are not really musicals anymore, why should revivals be revivals? Instead, for years now, we have had hybrid forms. In many cases, any old show is resuscitated, title intact, with some songs from its original production, others culled from random shows by the same composer.

And there it is -- one "new Gershwin musical" after another.

Red, Hot and Blue the Paper Mill Playhouse's current production, is such a new-old (or old-new?) show, though its composer-lyricist is Cole Porter. Directed by Michael Leeds, the show started out last year at the Goodspeed Opera in East Haddam, Conn. The Paper Mill has about 900 more seats, and the extra room works to this play's advantage.

Happily, the production is very good, a joyful trip back to a bygone era, the kind of show Paper Mill has the resources to do and does well. But it is an artificially induced product that does not bear the Paper Mill brand name. As New Jersey's officially designated state theater and, potentially, one of the country's precious few showplaces for musicals, Paper Mill must come up with its own creations, or its own distinctive re-creations.

The show is crazy and mixed-up. There is a mishmash of vintage Porter songs, suavely accompanying a dopey book, reworked by Mr. Leeds after the 1936 original by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. That production was custom-made for its stars: Ethel Merman, Bob Hope and Jimmy Durante. Of 17 songs, ranging from sublime to sublimely ridiculous, 9 derive from the original score. The rest, including ravishing perennials like "Just One of Those Things," "I've Got You Under My Skin" and "You Do Something to Me" were lifted from other Porter musicals.

The reworking radiates glee, sheer giddiness. Andy Blankenbuehler's inventive choreography embraces sensual tango, all-out tap and a chorus line of convicts.

Debbie Gravitte is Goodspeed's only major holdover among the cast. As Nails O'Reilly Duquesne, an unlikely society lady whose favored charity project is rehabilitating pickpockets, burglars and other lowlifes to the high life of dilettantism. Ms. Gravitte segues from trashy to classy with the greatest of ease. Her vocal attack and wicked comic timing thrive in a Broadway-size house like Paper Mill's. She delivers "Down in the Depths" with the torchy, brassy savvy an inimitably Porter song demands. It is too bad that her costumes are unflattering.

Bruce Adler does a hilarious show-stealing turn, onstage, down the aisles and in the orchestra pit, as Policy Pinkle, star convict. In duet on a starlit veranda or on the ballroom floor, Felicia Finley and Michael Gruber are an airborne romantic pair.

Mr. Leeds's adaptation lands bull's-eye thrusts at the useless upper class and bribe-hungry politicians. To inmates like Rats and Bugs Dugan, Eagle-Eye O'Roarke and Hot Dog Metelli, the idea of parole is an offense, for there is no place like home in prison.

Red, Hot and Blue is so nonsensical, it makes perfect sense. Even the puns, groaners all, are funny, especially in counterpoint to literate lyrics -- Porter prime. Abelard and Heloise and Dorothy Parker inhabit the same song, and violin rhymes with Lohengrin.

Red, Hot and Blue is a welcome divertissement, a fabulous side-trip, a validation of how good Paper Mill can get. But a theater devoted to perpetuating musicals cannot coast along with an occasional hybrid winner emanating from another theater, not when the imperiled musical theater depends on its artistic fulfillment of an essential mission.


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