Chez Joey

 Last Saturday, I saw the Arena Stage's adaptation of the Rodgers & Hart musical, Pal Joey, which dates to 1940 and was based on a series of New Yorker stories by John O'Hara. I really still find O'Hara, in his stories and some of his novels, a wonderful writer. These stories were out of his Hollywood/nightclub stories (the others were set in Gibbsville, his made-up town in the Pennsylvania anthracite country modeled after Pottsville, his home town; and New York City and its environs).

Joey in the original musical remains a heel. He has an affair with a rich lady who becomes an angel for his club, but it ends badly. The critics didn't like the 1940 show because the characters, totally real, seemed unattractive to them. So they got all high and mighty and puritanical about it, including Brooks Atkinson of The Times. O'Hara had taken a lot of critical abuse over the years because of what was seen as gratuitous sex in his novels. 

This is all to say that I was game for whatever the Arena decided to do with this show. They changed the name to Chez Joey, which only seemed to mean that the whole show took place in the club that eventually bore that name. The first act was slow as far as I was concerned. They included lots of good R&Hart songs, like I Could Write a Book, Where or When, and even My Funny Valentine, one of their greatest and one I'm absolutely sure was not in the original or previously revived (the production I had seen in New York) Pal Joey. They changed a lot of the tunes, which was too bad, because Rodgers was nothing if not a master melodist. In case I haven't made it clear, the first act left me cold.

The second act, however, saved the show, for me anyway. The show was directed and more importantly, choreographed, by Savion Glover, the greatest modern tap dancer, who more or less revived this art. He didn't dance in the show but his footwork was evident because in the second act, fantastic tap was performed. It even reminded me of those movies with the Nicholas Brothers, fabulous tappers in '30s movies from whom even Fred Astaire learned a lot. Tap did get revived, especially by Glover, a couple of decades ago, and some of the old tappers still around, like Honi Coles, got some work, which was a nice dividend of the revival.

So, this show, with a largely black cast, except for the white female lead--really one of three female leads--who sang the one great song fro the original show, Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered, in the end left you leaving the theater with a good feeling.. Miles Frost, the male lead, Joey, showed plenty of talent, and bears the distinction of having performed the role of Michael Jackson in many productions of the musical based on MJ, as that musical was titled. He won a Tony for playing MJ in the Broadway production but admitted in the showbill bio that he'd hardly played any other major roles.