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    Review: Long-Lost ‘Love Life’ Still Has a Lot to Say About America

    Brian Stokes Mitchell, Kate Baldwin and other top-shelf singers star in an overly sentimental production of the long-lost Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner show.In recent years, Encores! has presented productions of musicals with good name recognition, including “Into the Woods,” “Titanic” and “Urinetown.” With its latest offering, “Love Life,” the series returns to its original mission statement by presenting an obscure show, one devoid of standards at that — nothing in it would start a singalong at even the most hard-core piano bar.Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s musical opened on Broadway in 1948, ran for 252 performances and over the years has developed a cult following largely thanks to its daring storytelling. It touched on what constitutes the fabric of American life and integrated vaudevillian interludes, thus paving the way for the likes of “Cabaret” and “Chicago.”Yet the show has been absent from New York stages in the intervening decades. There wasn’t even an original cast recording to help popularize the score. There is grainy footage of one of its original stars, Nanette Fabray, performing “Green-Up Time” on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” and some numbers have popped up on various albums, like Bryn Terfel’s cover of “Here I’ll Stay.” But for the most part, “Love Life” is fairly unknown these days.Naturally, this made it a desirable target for Encores!, which is presenting a semi-staged production through Sunday at New York City Center.As directed by Victoria Clark, this “Love Life” gives us only glimpses of the musical’s potential. The vocals are top-shelf, with particularly thrilling ensemble singing and harmonies, especially on “Susan’s Dream,” which almost gets within reach of the Encores! high-water mark of “Sing for Your Supper” in its 1997 production of “The Boys From Syracuse.” (Rob Berman conducts the onstage orchestra.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Love Life,’ the Lost Great American Musical, Returns Over 75 Years Later

    Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s pioneering “Love Life” was thwarted by circumstance. Now, it is coming to Encores! at New York City Center.For some people, seeing the musical “Love Life” in 1948 was an eye-opening experience.As a new show with music by Kurt Weill, and a book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, it was a major Broadway event. So Stephen Sondheim got himself a ticket, as did his future collaborator Hal Prince. One night Fred Ebb, of Kander and Ebb, was in the house; another night, Bob Fosse.All of them would be influenced by “Love Life,” which tells the story of an American marriage over 150 years through a series of vaudeville acts. It’s by no means a classic, but its form pioneered the concept musical, a genre that would blossom a generation later in shows like Kander and Ebb’s “Cabaret” and “Chicago,” and Sondheim’s “Company” and “Follies.”Ebb would look back on “Love Life” as “a marvelous piece of theater.” Yet it hasn’t been seen in New York since that original run. Because of a musicians’ union strike, it was never recorded, nor was it published. Some songs lived on, but eventually it gained a reputation as the lost great American musical.The 1948 production (with Nanette Fabray, center) was inspired, in part, by Alan Jay Lerner, who was recently divorced and interested in writing “a cavalcade of American marriage.”Billy Rose Theater Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsThat is about to change. “Love Life” is finally returning to Manhattan on Wednesday, after decades of neglect and a five-year pandemic delay, for an Encores! production at New York City Center, directed by Victoria Clark and starring Kate Baldwin and Brian Stokes Mitchell.“It’s always seemed that ‘Love Life’ was jinxed,” said the scholar Kim Kowalke, who runs the Kurt Weill Foundation. “Maybe the jinx is off now.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Urinetown’ Review: More Than Toilet Humor

    The Encores! revival of the musical from Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis seems even more relevant today.About halfway through the first act of “Urinetown,” the characters Hope Cladwell and Bobby Strong reveal their emotions and desires in “Follow Your Heart.” Their names could have been lifted from a Depression-era musical, and the song itself evokes such romantic classics of that time as “I Only Have Eyes for You.”“We all want a world / Filled with peace and with joy,” Hope (the comic revelation Stephanie Styles) and Bobby (an effortlessly charismatic Jordan Fisher, fresh from a stint as Orpheus in “Hadestown”) sing in the Encores! revival that opened Wednesday night at New York City Center. “With plenty of water for each girl and boy,” they continue.You see, our lovebirds, whom Fisher and Styles portray with a precisely calibrated mix of earnestness and goofiness, live in a dystopian world where water is scarce. Exacting payment for the privilege of peeing has become a profitable business for Hope’s tycoon father, Caldwell B. Cladwell (Rainn Wilson, not quite villainous enough), the head of the Urine Good Company corporation.Bobby, on the other hand, is very much from the downtrodden side of the tracks. More specifically he’s the assistant custodian at the public toilet known as Amenity No. 9, run by the imperious Penelope Pennywise (Keala Settle, amped up to 11 as if rehearsing for Norma Desmond).The jarring reference to a commodity perhaps more essential than peace and joy in such a lovely number confirms that the “Urinetown” team of Mark Hollmann (music and lyrics) and Greg Kotis (book and lyrics) was not just a new version of Harry Warren and Al Dubin, the bards of 1930s Warner Bros. musicals. A bespoke pastiche of a specific vintage style, “Follow Your Heart” also contains a streak of modern sarcasm and political commentary that helps explain why “Urinetown” has aged so remarkably well since its premiere a little more than a quarter of a century ago.The show, which started life at the International New York Fringe Festival in 1999, had an Off Broadway run in the spring of 2001 and reopened on Broadway on Sept. 20 that same year. It won the Tony Awards for best book, original score and direction of a musical, and ran for two and a half years. The inclusion of “Urinetown” — an unlikely hit but nevertheless a hit — in Encores! underlines the mission drift of a series that used to be dedicated to flops and obscurities but nowadays simply “revisits the archives of American musical theater.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Sutton Foster and Michael Urie Reunite in the Zany ‘Once Upon a Mattress’

    The hit Encores! production has transferred to Broadway, with a cast fiercely dedicated to entertaining its audience.Princess Winnifred and Prince Dauntless are goofy and playful characters. In most musicals, they would provide comic relief from the main story line. But in “Once Upon a Mattress,” it’s the funny people who rule, both literally and figuratively.All the more so since Winnifred and Dauntless are played by Sutton Foster and Michael Urie in symbiotic performances that are highly controlled and precise while maintaining the appearance of off-the-cuff abandon.And with the rest of the cast mostly following suit, it is refreshing to see actors so actively dedicating themselves to entertaining their audience. This kind of unabashed reveling in the joys of strutting your stuff appears to be in demand, too, judging by the recent success of “Oh, Mary!” and “Cats: The Jellicle Ball.”The family-friendly “Once Upon a Mattress,” which premiered in 1959, is a good fit for the Encores! series — which stages shows that are rarely revived and presented this one in January. Now the production has transferred, with some changes in the supporting cast, to the Hudson Theater on Broadway.Like many Encores! entries, Mary Rodgers and Marshall Barer’s variation on the Hans Christian Andersen tale “The Princess and the Pea” would probably struggle to crack anybody but a tween’s Top 10 list of the best musicals ever.Also like many of those entries, “Once Upon a Mattress” turns out to be surprisingly sturdy in the right hands. Rodgers’s music is zingy and Barer’s lyrics often deploy sneakily enjoyable wordplay (“I lack a lass; alas! Alack!”). Just as important, the book by Barer, Jay Thompson and Dean Fuller is engineered to let gifted comic actors run loose — it is no coincidence that Carol Burnett originated the role of Winnifred.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Review: A Glorious ‘Titanic,’ Returned From the Depths

    Maury Yeston’s score, stupendously played and sung, is the star of the final production of an excellent Encores! season at New York City Center.Among the 1,500 people who died aboard R.M.S. Titanic on April 15, 1912, eight were musicians, playing through the ship’s last hours to solace themselves and their doomed companions. It seems only fitting, then, that among the many ways to love the splendid Encores! revival of “Titanic,” which opened on Tuesday at New York City Center, the best is as a tribute to the power of music to address the largest and gravest human emotions.And what music! Though fully a modern theatrical work, the score by Maury Yeston harks back to the grandeur and pathos of period English symphonists. In “Godspeed Titanic,” his glorious hymn to the ship upon its departure, it’s Elgar and Vaughan Williams you hear. When Peter Stone’s book requires a more expository style to depict the class contrasts onboard, it often arrives in the operetta voice of Arthur Sullivan. For comic bits and social dances, Yeston ventriloquizes ragtime and early salon-style jazz. All of this is wound together in a seamless composition that could almost stand on its own.Or at least it could in the Encores! revival, which features one of the series’ largest orchestras — larger even than the one in the pit at the show’s 1997 Broadway premiere. Here the 30 instrumentalists are fully visible, on a platform above the stage, responding to the music direction of Rob Berman with full drama and no schmaltz. Seeing them play almost continuously as the action below hurtles toward disaster — there are nearly two hours of music in a production that’s barely longer — further echoes and honors the efforts of their Edwardian colleagues.The cast of 32, especially when singing en masse, does the same for the lost passengers. (The vocal arrangements are thrilling.) At times, the beauty and force made me cry, then blew the tears out of my eyes.A focus on musical excellence is more than just a welcome return to the Encores! mission (as this entire season has been). That mission — to revive shows that would be difficult to produce otherwise, in simple stagings that prioritize the spirit of their original musical intention — is a bull’s-eye for “Titanic,” which thematically and otherwise depends on its size. Even so, it is a test for the series, which, over the years, has enhanced its sets, costumes and choreography to a nearly commercial level, sometimes at the expense of other values.But in approaching “Titanic,” the director Anne Kauffman, represented on Broadway this season by the exquisite “Mary Jane,” has moved decisively back toward bare bones. Not that there was much choice: An Encores! revival could not begin to encompass the show’s drama by visual means, as the original Broadway production did with massive decks lifting, tilting and sliding. In that version, the ship’s architect, Thomas Andrews, was killed by a rogue piano.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Jelly’s Last Jam’ Review: A Musical Paradise, Even in Purgatory

    Did Jelly Roll Morton “invent” jazz, as he claimed? A sensational Encores! revival offers a postmortem prosecution of one of the form’s founding fathers.That painful history can be alchemized into thrilling entertainment is both the central idea and the takeaway experience of “Jelly’s Last Jam,” the jaw-dropping Encores! revival that opened on Wednesday at City Center. Especially in its first act, as it tells the intertwined stories of Jelly Roll Morton and the early years of jazz, it offers up wonder after wonder, in songs and dances so neatly conceived and ferociously performed that in the process of blowing the roof off the building they also make your hair stand on end.It might not be immediately apparent from its strange framework that the musical could produce such an effect. The book, by George C. Wolfe, who also directed the 1992 Broadway original, introduces us to Morton (Nicholas Christopher) at the moment of his death. That’s when he is greeted, in a kind of nightclub limbo, by Chimney Man — so called because this forbidding psychopomp, played by the fascinatingly strict Billy Porter, sweeps souls to their destination. Accompanied by a trio of louche, bespangled “Hunnies,” he first puts Morton through a recap of his life, with an emphasis on his lies, betrayals and musicological self-aggrandizement.Tiffany Mann as Miss Mamie, a local blues singer. One of her powerhouse numbers points Morton on the road north.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow many of those lies and betrayals really happened is unclear; most of the musical’s specific situations and supporting characters seem to be inventions or conflations. But the self-aggrandizement is all too real. Morton, not content to be merely a great pianist and composer in the early years of jazz, repeatedly claimed to have “invented” the genre. It is for this sin — a sin against history but also against Blackness — that the show seeks to prosecute him.If only real trials were as entertaining. Morton’s privileged but stifling youth in a wealthy, light-skinned New Orleans family is sketched in a series of numbers that efficiently establish the expectations of the Creole class and his rebellions against it. Like most rebellions, his involve exposure to different kinds of people; when the boy (beautifully played by Alaman Diadhiou) sneaks into the dives and brothels on the Blacker side of town, the sounds of tinkers, ragpickers, beignet men and voodoo vendors, layered and compressed and powerfully polyrhythmic, open his ears to a new kind of music.As presented here, that music is sensationally catchy. (Though mostly Morton’s, it also includes material written by Luther Henderson for the 1992 production.) Somewhat miraculously considering its knottiness, it has been set with lyrics, by Susan Birkenhead, that spark and sparkle. In numbers like “The Whole World’s Waitin’ to Sing Your Song,” she weaves scat and slang and classic Broadway wordsmithery (“Slide that sound/Roll that rhythm/Syncopate the street-beat with ’em”) into a multipurpose dramatic net.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Jelly’s Last Jam’ Returns, Bringing a Jazz Tale to a New Generation

    Jason Michael Webb, the show’s guest music director, said he wants audiences at the musical about Jelly Roll Morton to experience “a time period that does not exist anymore.”The team behind the Encores! revival of “Jelly’s Last Jam” is not looking to reinvent George C. Wolfe’s ambitious 1992 Broadway show. But they do hope that this rendition, opening on Wednesday at New York City Center, will introduce the musical to a new generation.Taking that idea a step further, Jason Michael Webb, the show’s guest music director, said he also wanted audiences “to immerse themselves in a joy in a time period that does not exist anymore.”That joy comes via the story of jazz and the works of Jelly Roll Morton, a ragtime pianist who said he invented the genre in 1902. In “Jelly’s Last Jam,” Morton is portrayed as a conflicted soul, a mixed-race man of Creole descent whose light hue gives him privilege in his hometown, New Orleans. He rebels against his heritage and soaks in the music of economically disadvantaged Black people, stirring up dissension in his family. He goes out on the road and becomes a well-known musician. Yet as jazz music’s popularity swells, Morton’s impact on it is forgotten. He’s a pioneer but isn’t given proper credit for it.John Clay III and Nicholas Christopher rehearsing last week at New York City Center before the show’s two-week run, which begins Wednesday.Nate Palmer for The New York TimesWhile Morton’s music is the centerpiece here, the show also features lyrics by Susan Birkenhead and additional compositions by Luther Henderson. In his review of the production, which starred Gregory Hines and Savion Glover as the older and younger versions of Morton, the Times critic Frank Rich called the first act “sizzling,” adding, “at once rollicking and excessive, roof-raising and overstuffed, you fly into intermission, high on the sensation that something new and exciting is happening.”The Encores! production features slightly tweaked arrangements by Webb, a Broadway veteran and Tony Award nominee for his orchestrations for “MJ the Musical.” Nicholas Christopher (“Sweeney Todd”) and Alaman Diadhiou take on the older and younger Morton roles, respectively, and other cast members include Billy Porter, Joaquina Kalukango, Leslie Uggams and Okierete Onaodowan.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘The Light in the Piazza’ Through an Asian American Lens at Encores!

    A new Encores! staging of the 2005 musical, starring Ruthie Ann Miles, considers what it is like to feel like an outsider, at home and abroad.Inside a New York City Center studio, at a rehearsal for the Encores! revival of “The Light in the Piazza,” two young lovers in 1950s Italy were meeting for the first time.“This is my mother, Margaret Johnson,” Clara, a suddenly smitten American tourist, said to Fabrizio, a local Italian.“Johnson,” Fabrizio repeated, connecting the name to a then-popular Hollywood star. “Van Johnson?!”“Yes!” Clara enthused.“You are — relative?” Fabrizio asked.“No, no,” the mother, Margaret, cut in.And then, so too, did the director, Chay Yew. He turned to Ruthie Ann Miles, the Tony-winning actress playing Margaret, with a note.“Van Johnson is white,” Yew said, gesturing at his own Asian face.The group nodded. They started the scene again, and when Miles got to her line, she drew out the “noooo” while encircling her own Asian face with her finger to make the contrast exceedingly clear to the lovestruck Fabrizio.The move sent onlookers into a fit of laughter.“In the great works of art, there are ways to find more life between sentences and scenes,” said Chay Yew, who is directing the Encores! production.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesNothing in the book, music or lyrics of this Tony Award-winning 2005 Broadway musical has been changed in the revival, which opens on Wednesday for a short run. But the casting of Asian American actresses in two of the main roles has reframed the musical to emphasize its exploration of the otherness — an otherness that some Asian Americans often feel in the United States and elsewhere. Without revisions, that point of view will have to come through in Yew’s direction and the actors’ interpretations.When Miles (“The King and I”) agreed to play Margaret, Yew began thinking about homing in on her background as a Korean American to further explore the experience of feeling like an outsider. The spike in anti-Asian violence during the pandemic, Yew said, was still very much front of mind.“No matter how Asian American you are, you’re always going to be the perpetual foreigner. The face that we wear,” Yew said, “always makes you feel that you do not belong in this country.“So I was interested in, well, what does it really mean to explore the outsider status in this particular musical?” Yew, a playwright and director of shows like “Cambodian Rock Band,” added. “It actually helps open up the music a little bit more. I think in the great works of art, there are ways to find more life between sentences and scenes.”“The Light in the Piazza,” which originally starred Victoria Clark as Margaret and Kelli O’Hara as Clara, tracks a woman and her daughter on vacation in Italy. Love is at its heart: Clara (Anna Zavelson) falls for Fabrizio (James D. Gish); Margaret wants to disrupt the romance to protect her daughter, who suffered a brain injury as a child that renders her childlike even as an adult; and Margaret herself is stuck in a seemingly loveless marriage to a husband who stayed at home in North Carolina.It is the Johnsons’ status as tourists — outsiders in a foreign land — that allows preoccupations with Clara’s disability to fade, her love to blossom and Margaret’s perspective to shift such that she can begin to let her daughter go. In leaving home, both women, in a sense, find themselves.Nothing in the book, music or lyrics of “The Light in the Piazza” has been changed in the revival, which opens on Wednesday at City Center.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesFor Asian Americans, determining exactly what and where feels like home can be tricky. Clint Ramos, who designed the set with Miguel Urbino and is part of the Encores! leadership team, recalled having seen the show 10 times during its original run. He had moved to New York from the Philippines, and the idea of becoming totally immersed in a new place — and loving it — resonated. “Every time was ugly crying,” he said of seeing the musical.Miles was at the top of the Encores! list for the role of Margaret. (In his 2005 review of the show, Ben Brantley wrote that the character “qualifies as a blessing for those in search of signs of intelligent life in the American musical.”) They felt Miles “was virtuosic enough to actually handle the score, but also such an excellent actor,” Ramos said.With the role cast, Yew and Miles studied the history of Korean immigration and determined, for subtext, that Miles’s Margaret could have come to the United States in the early 1900s to study art and learn English, then met her white husband, settled in the South and eventually had a child.Miles, who has been juggling this show with her Tony-nominated role as the beggar woman in the Broadway revival of “Sweeney Todd,” was born in the United States, then spent a few years as a young child in South Korea before returning to the U.S. with her mother. She recalled learning English while growing up in Hawaii as her Korean language skills diminished and becoming frustrated with her mother’s stubborn accent and lack of concern, unlike her friends’ parents, about things like having nice clothes. Over time, she said she even developed a sort of bitterness toward her mother.“And so I carry all of these stories and these ideas with me when we’re building Margaret,” she said.Zavelson, who graduated from high school last year and is making her professional New York debut in the musical, has always wanted to sing the score, but said she had never seen someone who looked like her play the role of Clara. Zavelson said she is Japanese American and Jewish.Anna Zavelson, as Clara, above with Gish, who plays Fabrizio, said she never “pictured myself being able to sing that role” because it’s usually filled by a white actress. Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“I don’t think that I had pictured myself being able to sing that role,” Zavelson said, because Clara has usually been played by a white actress. “Growing up, I think every kid is like, ‘Wouldn’t that be fun if I did this?’ But once you get to middle school, high school, and start to realize that you’re perceived differently by certain people, I think a lot of me was kind of like, ‘Oh, well, I’ll let that role die.’”“But seeing that Ruthie was attached to it just kind of lit something inside of me,” she continued. “I’m from Texas and Margaret and Clara are from North Carolina. So it’s not the same geographically, but having a Southern Asian American with a last name like Johnson isn’t actually that far from me.”And despite the effects of Clara’s injury, she is a generally upbeat, optimistic young woman who is warmly embraced by Fabrizio’s family, Zavelson said.So although the actors were still exploring their characters during rehearsals last week, Zavelson said she suspected many of the race-conscious nuances layered into the performance would manifest through Margaret, and the mother-daughter interactions between Clara and Margaret. To what extent does Margaret have an internalized fear of racism that makes her more hesitant to embrace Fabrizio and his family? How have her experiences as an immigrant toughened her? And how does that toughness play out in Margaret’s interactions with Clara?Exactly how to integrate the feeling of racial otherness into the show was also an ongoing challenge for the cast.“Maybe it’s slight racism from other people in Italy, whether it’s a gesture or a look,” Miles said.Miles also saw “The Light in the Piazza” on Broadway, and said she immediately noticed the “sweeping orchestration and beautiful vocals and this really human story of love and grief and regret.”But as she has played back the music in the years since, it speaks to her differently.It is no secret, she said, that she and her husband, Jonathan Blumenstein, have endured tragedy. In 2018, their daughter, Abigail, 5, was killed, and Miles herself critically injured when they were struck by a car while walking in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Miles was pregnant at the time, and two months later, near her due date, lost the baby.“I really feel the ways that Margaret tries to be strong and wants to let everybody know that she is in control and everything is OK,” Miles said. “But then what happens when the doors are closed?”When Margaret finally allows herself to be vulnerable for the audience, she continued, it could become a way for her personally “to finally take a breath and show perhaps a little bit more of the true me.”“Hopefully it’s not until the end of the show,” she added. “Because I won’t recover.” More