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    ‘Pal Joey’ Review: Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildering

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    Joey is still a heel in this major revision of the 1940 antihero musical, but he’s now a Black artist trying to find his true voice.It’s not often that the standout star of a show is its music supervisor, arranger or orchestrator, but in the gala presentation of “Pal Joey” at New York City Center through Sunday, all three are one man, Daryl Waters. More than the authors of the ambitious, bewildering revival’s new book, Waters, who has served similar roles on musicals as varied as “Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk,” “After Midnight,” “The Cher Show” and “New York, New York,” makes a clear case in beautiful sound for its investigation into the melting pot of American music.That the rest of the revival (really a new creature, made from spare parts) is more suggestive than convincing is no crime; there has never been a satisfactory “Pal Joey.” Though the 1940 original featured some soon-to-be standards by Rodgers and Hart — “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” chief among them — its book by John O’Hara, based on his epistolary novel and New Yorker stories, didn’t match them in tone or dramatic serviceability.Back then, the problem was thought to be the nature of Joey himself, a greasy heel trying to scheme his way from itinerant crooner to supper club smoothie. Along the way he picked up and discarded an innocent named Linda English, traded sex for financial support with a socialite named Vera Simpson and generally ruined everything he touched with his grifty hands. The New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson concluded that the show was distasteful because you couldn’t “draw sweet water from a foul well.”But the rise and triumph of the antihero show, with protagonists like J. Pierrepont Finch, Sweeney Todd and Evan Hansen, has since proved such characters ripe for musicalization. The problem faced by the various would-be saviors of “Pal Joey” — there were Broadway revivals in 1952, 1963, 1976 and 2008 — is rather what new throughline to impose and how to make the best use of its songs.In choosing to alter the racial frame of the story, the current version’s adapters, Richard LaGravenese and Daniel Koa Beaty, have made a powerful and promising intervention. Their Joey (Ephraim Sykes) is Black, with the tortured soul of a true artist. The Chicago club in which he sings is now a Black establishment, run by Lucille Wallace (Loretta Devine), a former star of Harlem nightspots. Linda (Aisha Jackson) is a Black singer, too, but one who prefers radio to live performance so as to be “judged by what people hear, not by what they see.”Sykes as Joey and Elizabeth Stanley as the socialite Vera Simpson, who financially supports Joey.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat is all worth exploring, and sometimes succeeds in snapping the tired old setups into vivid life. Because Vera (Elizabeth Stanley) is still white, her dalliance with Joey takes on new overtones and evokes new dangers. Though Joey remains acquisitive of both women and wealth, and Sykes, a Tony nominee for “Ain’t Too Proud,” is excellent at making his cunning charismatic, he is no longer shallow. Instead he’s deep, trying to find a way to render his true voice in a white world. Ancestral spirits who, according to the script, represent “soul, authenticity, power and freedom,” encourage him through percussive sound and movement; the often-astonishing choreography, part tap, part stomp, part African dance, is by Savion Glover.Interesting as all this is, or could be with further time and elaboration, race was the wrong problem to solve in “Pal Joey.” What really never worked, and still does not, is the way the songs hang with the story. Innovators though they were, Rodgers and Hart had only just begun to explore, as Rodgers would continue to do much more deeply with Oscar Hammerstein II, how to make song an expression of narrative itself, not just a character sketch or appliquéd decoration. In particular, Hart’s delightful lyrics (“I’m vexed again./Perplexed again./Thank God I can be oversexed again”) kept pulling focus from the show’s heart of darkness with their sparky wit.The new “Pal Joey” doubles down on that problem. Not counting two reprises, it features all or parts of 21 songs, only seven of which were written for “Pal Joey.” (Another eight of the originals were cut.) Because the added songs come from a variety of other shows, mostly “The Boys From Syracuse” and “Babes in Arms,” these are naturally even more decorative and disengaged than the originals. It does nothing to turn the vanishingly minor Melba Snyder — a society reporter who sings (and strips to) the great but obviously shoehorned “Zip” — into Melvin Snyder (Brooks Ashmanskas), who bravely does the same. You still have no idea why the character is there.Sykes, Aisha Jackson and ensemble members in the gala production, which features Savion Glover’s often-astonishing choreography.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOn the other hand, the giant and varied new tunestack — including standards like “Where or When,” “My Funny Valentine” and “Blue Moon” — gives Waters some gorgeous raw material to work with. It’s a mystery to me how he creates so many conflicting kinds of sound, representing different strands of American popular music, from just four players onstage (including the devastating trumpeter Alphonso Horne) and five offstage. Sometimes the original songs are barely recognizable in their new clothing; at other times they have the uncanny familiarity of a post-facelift face that makes you want to say: You look different.Satisfying as that then-and-now duality is in theory, it adds to a rather large list of confusing and incomplete choices overall. What does it mean that Vera almost outdoes the Black characters in the use of scat singing and melismatic riffs? (Stanley is pushing way too hard.) Why does the relationship between Vera and Joey provoke racist threats while Lucille’s with a white gangster (Jeb Brown) provokes nothing but laughs? (Devine is a welcome source of humor and good spirits in the otherwise nearly humorless production.) Why is Linda barely integrated into the action, performing most of her songs (rendered modestly by Jackson) in the no-context of a recording booth?And though the roughness of the sound (many lyrics were unintelligible as of Wednesday night) and the longueurs of the staging (by Tony Goldwyn and, again, Glover) can be written off to the usual City Center problem of under-rehearsal, a show with such evidently large ambitions — Emilio Sosa’s glamorous early-1940s costumes, a monumental under-the-el set by Derek McLane, lit moodily by Jon Goldman — needs to be more than intriguing. It needs to be coherent.You can certainly count on coherence from the songs themselves, no matter how randomly they sometimes seem to have been placed in one Rodgers and Hart show instead of another. Even completely shorn of plot relevance, they are evergreen for a reason. Though this “Pal Joey” rightfully questions the appropriation of Black voices in American popular song — referring to the King of Jazz, Paul Whiteman, and the King of Swing, Benny Goodman, Joey says, “Awful lot of Kings out there playing our music” — it’s strange to build that argument on the back of these standards. If they’re the problem, why celebrate them, and make them sound so good in the process?Pal JoeyThrough Nov. 5 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      Joey Evans Is Back. This Time He’s a Struggling Artist.

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      Joey Evans is a charming cad, a heel, an unapologetic womanizer, a gigolo. He’s a second-rate nightclub entertainer who breaks the heart of an ingénue and seduces a rich older woman, trading sex for money.In 1940, some people found Joey, the protagonist of the 1940 Rodgers and Hart musical “Pal Joey,” repellent. “Can you draw sweet water from a foul well?” Brooks Atkinson famously wondered in his review for The New York Times.In the decades since, though, the main charge against the show hasn’t been foulness so much as incoherence. Production after production — the last one on Broadway was in 2008 — has attempted to rescue a handful of great Rodgers and Hart songs from the weak book that John O’Hara cobbled together from some of his demotic short stories published in The New Yorker.Seven years ago, the director Tony Goldwyn — best known as an actor — decided to try his hand at a rescue operation. He brought in the screenwriter Richard LaGravenese, and together they came up with an idea: What if Joey were a gifted, struggling artist? That way, it wouldn’t just be a story of sex and betrayal but also one of art versus ambition. After a few readings, though, that twist didn’t seem reason enough for a revival, so they added another: What if Joey were Black?Ephraim Sykes, who plays Joey Evans, with Marshal Davis, left, and Glover. “Playing this part has been freeing,” Sykes said. “Music is the lifeblood of this man, and it just so happens that one of his instruments is his body.”Amir Hamja/The New York TimesTo tell that story, Goldwyn and LaGravenese, who are white, felt they needed Black collaborators, which is why their production of “Pal Joey,” opening at New York City Center on Nov. 1, is co-directed by Goldwyn and the tap dancer Savion Glover, who also did the choreography; and has a new book by LaGravenese and Daniel Beaty.The new story, set in the 1940s, is, as Beaty put it, “about the evolution of a Black artist” — a forward-thinking jazz singer — “in a world where there was no space for him to be his authentic self and what that costs him.” This is a story, he added, with contemporary relevance: “We’re still wrestling with a world where those the system has not been built for are fighting to have a voice.”It was Beaty’s idea to add some characters who would have been very surprising in any previous production of “Pal Joey” — Black ancestral spirits called the Griots. “At the start of the show, we have this character who is brokenhearted because of the absence of space for him,” he said, “but these ancestors appear, like an energy that lives within him, and give him some hope.”In this iteration of the play, Sykes’s Joey has a soul, and ancestors appear in the form of extraordinary tap dancers.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesThose ancestors appear in the form of extraordinary tap dancers, including Dormeshia and Glover. And they keep reappearing throughout the show to remind Joey of his authentic self. This Joey, played by Ephraim Sykes, has a soul, and that soul expresses itself in the deeply rooted sound of Savion Glover’s tap dancing.The Griots are “a connection to something very old,” Beaty said. “The artists who have danced, sang and acted this path before. I have sat with many of them: Ossie Davis, Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte. Ruby Dee told me, ‘We have always had to dance with a gun at our feet, but still we must dance.’”Glover, too, has always been an artist attuned to his ancestors, especially the veteran tap dancers who mentored him when he was a child. His solo shows can feel like séances, his jazz improvisations quoting those dead teachers and summoning their spirits. “Those Griots could be Jimmy Slyde, Lon Chaney, Chuck Green and Buster Brown,” he said, listing four hoofer-mentors he celebrated in the 1996 Broadway musical “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk,” for which he won a Tony Award for choreography.“Wherever I am, they will be,” he added. “They walk with me.”And not just in the Griot sections. At a recent rehearsal of one of Joey’s nightclub numbers, Glover stressed that he was stealing a rhythm from Henry LeTang, who choreographed “Black and Blue,” the 1989 Broadway show in which a teenage Glover shared the stage with Slyde, Chaney and other tap masters.“I appreciate the platform for dance to be part of the storytelling,” Glover said. “But if I have a side agenda, it would be to remind people of the contribution of those old cats.”The first Joey, in 1940, was a then-little-known Gene Kelly, who vaulted from the part into Hollywood fame. Frank Sinatra played Joey for the sanitized 1957 film. Revivals at City Center in the 1960s starred Bob Fosse, years before he directed shows like “Chicago” that made Joey’s sleaze into a dominant style.But Beaty and Glover are connecting “Pal Joey” to another history, another well. Like many productions Glover has been involved with — from “Jelly’s Last Jam” in 1991 to the 2016 reimagining of “Shuffle Along” — this “Pal Joey” is concerned with the transformations of jazz.Glover has always been an artist attuned to his dance ancestors. “They walk with me,” he said.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesWorking with Glover “is a master class, to put it lightly,” Sykes said.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesIn the years after the premiere of “Pal Joey,” Rodgers and Hart’s last show together, jazz artists, more than any others, kept the songs of Rodgers and Hart alive, as ground for improvisations. This production’s new story has the benefit of justifying the inclusion of more of those songs. Along with eight from the original, including “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” and “I Could Write a Book,” this “Pal Joey” borrows 15 from other Rodgers and Hart shows, standards like “My Funny Valentine,” “Where or When,” “This Can’t Be Love” and “The Lady Is a Tramp.” Musically, the show is now a Rodgers and Hart songbook, rearranged by Daryl Waters and Glover.But the production’s jazz approach, evident in each number, is about more than just musical style. “Savion lives in the realm of possibility,” Goldwyn said. “Like: ‘Let’s not nail this down. Let’s see what it might begin to become.’ That creates an environment of constant discovery. It’s very fertile.”“We’re trying to create creation,” Glover said. “We want the audience to feel it is happening, like they’re at the club.”That kind of improvisational freedom requires a particular cast, especially a particular Joey. Sykes, who played David Ruffin in “Ain’t Too Proud,” the 2019 Broadway musical about the Temptations, trained as a dancer at the Alvin Ailey school.“I always spoke first with my body,” he said. “Learning to act standing still is something I’m still learning. Playing this part has been freeing. Music is the lifeblood of this man, and it just so happens that one of his instruments is his body.”“Savion lives in the realm of possibility,” Tony Goldwyn, center behind Glover, said. The pair are co-directors of this reimagined version. Amir Hamja/The New York TimesWorking with Glover, Sykes said, “is a master class, to put it lightly. He operates on such a different plane of thinking. He’s always pushing me past what I thought was my limit, and we’re all being pushed to create jazz, to make a different show every night.”A new character, a club owner named Lucille, is played by Loretta Devine, who was in the original cast of “Dreamgirls” in 1981. “She’s the closest to the language we’re trying to summon,” Glover said. “She’s the living proof.”LaGravenese said that the addition of the Lucille character, “the one closest to the ancestors,” was part of an idea to surround Joey with strong women. Linda, the ingénue, is now a confident equal, played by Aisha Jackson. Joey’s relationship with Vera, the rich older woman, played here by Elizabeth Stanley, is now interracial, which raises the stakes, but Vera’s character is also more complex.“In some earlier workshops, our Vera was the beautiful Marin Mazzie,” LaGravenese said. “And Marin” — who died in 2018 — “said ‘What if Vera really loves Joey?’ And that opened up another door to making her more human.”“Marin is an ancestor now, too,” Beaty said. “I think the energy we’ve been feeling in the rehearsal room is the presence of the ancestors. In the cultures I come from, Ghanaian and Cherokee and Blackfoot, we believe that when you invite in the ancestors, they show up.” More

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      A New ‘Pal Joey’ Is Broadway Bound

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      The show will be rewritten for a production set on the South Side of Chicago in the 1940s, directed by Tony Goldwyn and Savion Glover.“Pal Joey” is coming back to Broadway.The 1940 Rodgers and Hart musical about a caddish nightclub performer will be rewritten, re-set, and then revived for the next Broadway season, a producing team led by Jeffrey Richards announced Monday.The production will be set in a Black community — the South Side of Chicago in the 1940s — with a new book by Richard LaGravenese, a screenwriter and director who was nominated for an Oscar for “The Fisher King,” and who both adapted and directed a 2014 film version of “The Last Five Years.” The show was originally set a decade earlier, in the 1930s, and the main characters were played by white performers.Tony Goldwyn and Savion Glover will direct the new production. Goldwyn is best known as an actor, who starred in the television series “Scandal” and the Broadway adaptation of “Network,” while Glover is best known as a tap dancer and choreographer. He won a Tony Award for “Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk.”The directors: Tony Goldwyn, left, and Savion Glover.Walter McBride/Getty Images; Michael Loccisano/Getty Images“Pal Joey,” with a book originally by John O’Hara based on stories he had written for The New Yorker, is the rare Broadway musical that centers on an antihero, and is often described as cynical. Brooks Atkinson, a New York Times theater critic, wrote of the original production, “If it is possible to make an entertaining musical comedy out of an odious story, ‘Pal Joey’ is it,” and then concluded his review by posing a rhetorical question that has bedeviled the show over the decades, “Can you draw sweet water from a foul well?”The original, starring Gene Kelly and Vivienne Segal, ran for less than a year, but some of its songs, particularly “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” became standards; a 1952 revival was more successful, and prompted a 1957 film adaptation that starred Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak (but Hollywood turned Joey into a nice guy and gave the story a happy ending).By 1961, another critic for the Times, Howard Taubman, was pronouncing the musical “wonderful” and “vivid proof of what a great musical can be,” declaring that “its disenchanted, acidulous mood conforms well with the realism, if not cynicism, of our day.”There have been three subsequent Broadway revivals, all short-lived; the most recent, in 2008, was panned by New York Times critic Ben Brantley as “a production in mourning for its own lifelessness.”Of course, that history leaves room for reinvention, and that’s what the new team is hoping to do. Among other anticipated changes: In addition to an original score best known for “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” and “I Could Write a Book,” they plan to add other songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, including “Where or When,” “The Lady Is a Tramp,” “It Never Entered My Mind,” “My Heart Stood Still,” “Falling in Love With Love” and “There’s a Small Hotel.”The music is being overseen by Daryl Waters, who won a Tony for the orchestrations in “Memphis.” Also, one of the women treated poorly by Joey — Linda — will be portrayed as an aspiring singer, rather than as a stenographer, which will facilitate the use of the new songs; a parallel shift was made in the film, which also added some songs.In addition to Richards, the producing team for the upcoming revival includes Funny World Productions, Willette Klausner and Irene Gandy, a longtime theater publicist who this year received a Tony honor for excellence in theater. The producers said they expect to bring the revival to Broadway during the 2022-2023 season; they did not announce any casting. More