It feels like a series of landscape paintings.” Even Milk and Honey, which is about Israel, is about Americans abroad. There’s wanderlust ( Greenwillow), there’s the entrepreneurial oil people ( Wildcat), there’s a show about immigrants ( All American). If it’s true, we don’t deserve any credit for it. “One thing we discovered-quite unintentionally-is, when we took all these shows and put pieces of them together, they formed a very interesting picture of America at that particular time. Also, selfishly, I have to say it’s when I started going to the theater by myself-I was 13 years old, and I saw All American at a Saturday matinee-so it’s a trip down memory lane for me. “There are lots of shows from this period we’re interested in doing. Every time we’d try to match up Jerry Herman with Gershwin, it clashed stylistically, causing a weird disconnect. “We started with 50 shows and quickly realized it would be a more cohesive evening if all these shows came from the same period. “It was a long winnowing process,” Viertel confessed. It runs from Jamaica in 1957 to Mack & Mabel in 1974, but the filling in the middle is strictly 1960s confection. Hey, Look Me Over! is the title for this pupu platter of (hopefully) coming attractions from Encores!. It was a Eureka! moment, and the show suddenly had a shape. Clearly, this is a job for Man in Chair, Clayton quipped from the sidelines. He was watching his bosses-conductor Rob Berman and artistic director Jack Viertel-assembling a potpourri of 20 songs from eight shows on Encores!’s to-do list (“ nine, if you count the Subways Are for Sleeping overture,” said Viertel), and they were having trouble figuring out how to get from one show to another. Josh Clayton, associate music director for the City Center series, is given sole credit for resuscitating Man in Chair’s career. Then, the phone rang-in Godfather fashion-with an offer he couldn’t refuse: a pocketbook stage comeback of seven performances (February 7-11) for Man in Chair, where he curates an evening of all his pet musicals so far overlooked by Encores!-“not just The Drowsy Chaperone but the entire Gable-Stein canon.” One night last month, he slipped away from rehearsing one of the above and hosted a delightful little sing-and-dance-through of the show at Feinstein’s/54 Below with some main stem stars and replacements. These three previously collaborated on Elf, which has had a couple of limited Christmas gigs on Broadway, and now they have a fall date on Broadway with The Prom, directed by The Drowsy Chaperone’s Casey Nicholaw and starring said chaperone, Beth Leavel, along with Christopher Sieber and Brooks Ashmanskas.Įven with this intense workload, Drowsy dies hard for Martin. He’s adapting The Sting (March 29-April 29) from the Oscar-winning Paul Newman-Robert Redford flick for the director (John Rando) and songwriters (Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis) of Urinetown, following that with Half Time (May 31-July 1), a show about a company of elderly dancers, which he’s writing with Chad Beguelin and Matthew Sklar. Two of these are set for spring tryouts at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Milburn, N.J. Such a gift doesn’t create a lot of job opportunities, so Martin in the interim has-as they sing in Frozen-“let it go” and moved on to other chores, flitting from flower to flower, pollinating his second, third and fourth long-running Broadway musicals.
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