While much has been said and argued about on the merits of revising once and future musicals, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart did just that to their own 1927 hit, A Connecticut Yankee (adapted from "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" by Mark Twain). By adding the classy "Can You Do a Friend A Favor?" and the delightfully gruesome "To Keep My Love Alive, to the 1943 revival, the composing team now had two more song treasures to add to their score that already boasted "My Heart Stood Still," "Thou Swell," "I Feel At Home With You," and "On A Desert Island With Thee."
So, I'm not going to complain about the body of the cherished score, or even the way it is sung by the earnest and likeable cast assembled at the City Center to open the eighth season of the "Encores!" series of concert staging of classic American musicals. Although the show has its bright spots, the length and dullness of the ensemble numbers makes the quaint show seem unnecessarily padded and occasionally interminable.
Grateful that we are that director Schulman gives us a taste of "I Blush," a rather too cutesy and cumbersome ladies-in-waiting number that was cut from the 1927 production, and that she rightly chose to use more of Fields' 1927 script rather than the version spruced up for the wartime audience, the show still clanks along like a rusty old suit of armor.
The time is 1927 when Martin (Steven Sutcliffe) gets hit hard on the noggin by Fay (Christine Ebersole), his fiancee, who walks in on him at their engagement party holding Alice (Judith Blazer), his true love, in his arms. Martin awakens in Camelot where he is immediately smitten with Sandy (also played by Blazer) but pursued by the evil, jealous and notorious husband killer Morgan Le Fay (also played by a brassy Ebersole, whose octave-vaulting, multi-verse "To Keep My Love Alive," is the closest thing to a show stopper). While a naive, lame-brained King Arthur (Henry Gibson) and a dithering phony Merlin (Peter Bartlett) add their own inimitable and endearing shtick to the time(s) and the text - a mixing and mismatching of Medieval lingo and jazzy jabber, Martin goes about wooing Alice, modernizing Camelot, outfoxing Morgan, and showing up Merlin. One hour after intermission, Martin awakens in 1927, and the rest is history.
Standout among the support are Contact's Sean Martin Hingston (as Gerald and Galahad) and Nancy Lemenager (as Evelyn and Dame Evelyn), who sings, swivels and swirls through "On a Desert Island With Thee." Although choreographer Rob Ashford does well by them, he runs out of ideas for the ensemble numbers, particularly "The Camelot Samba," a laboriously-danced Latin Quarter number that should have been cut.
While the women's gowns and adornments make the transition smartly from modern to Medieval, the men's headwear, as knights of the round table, make them look like members of the Golden Horde at the court of Genghis Khan. Ron Leibman and Jessica Walter make a brief and stylish appearance as Launcelot and Guinevere. Rob Fisher (using Don Walker's crack 1943 arrangements) leads the fine Coffee Club Orchestra with the dash we have become accustomed to. But it remains for Hart's forever witty lyrics to ring in our ears long after the last wisecracks have faded away.
