New York Times

May 3, 1997

"The Boys From Syracuse": Unleashing Nostalgia

By BEN BRANTLEY

Sarah Uriarte Berry, Rebecca Luker and Debbie Gravitte

NEW YORK -- No, you weren't imagining it, though it's been hard to believe in these last weary weeks of the Broadway season. There really were musicals once that existed only to make people happy: when pure, bubbling silliness took on a stylized grace that released a rush of endorphins among even the most gray-souled of urban audiences.

Want to know what that sensation felt like? There are moments in the Encores concert revival of "The Boys From Syracuse," Rodgers and Hart's dizzy 1938 variation on Shakespeare's "Comedy of Errors," when it seems as if everyone at City Center, both on and off stage, has been pumped full of Prozac.

Just listen to the ecstatic roar that emerges from the audience after three comely young women finish stepping their perfectly synchronized way (and with close vocal harmonies to match) through a number called "Sing for Your Supper." There's both a giddy, sensual looseness and a mathematical precision in what the performers deliver here, and the pleasure they take from it is extremely contagious.

They are Rebecca Luker, Sarah Uriarte Berry and Debbie Gravitte. They're portraying a trio of love-vexed dames in ancient Greece, and what they're singing about -- the shameless sexual bartering through which a married woman earns her keep -- isn't something to warm the hearts of feminists. Nor, if you think about it, does the song have a whole lot to do with the show's labyrinthine plot.

But it's unlikely anyone is going to object. Under the direction of Susan H. Schulman, with choreography by Kathleen Marshall and a cast that seems delighted just to be there, this "Boys From Syracuse" hits high points that dissolve critical detachment.

The show, and especially its shtick-driven, smirky book by George Abbott, may be firmly lodged in another era. But this production, which has its fifth and final performance Sunday, breaks through the time warp often enough to create the immediate sense of a period when a Rodgers and Hart opening was something to live for.

In Abbott's hands, Shakespeare's tale of the confusions caused when two sets of long-lost identical twins show up in the same city wasn't much more than an occasion for knowing double-entendres and low slapstick. But for Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart it was another ripe chance to meditate on the irksome, blissful bewilderments of love.

This, of course, was before Rodgers joined Hammerstein to make the musical a more serious, organically wrought proposition. Here, working with Hart's insinuating, archly rhymed lyrics (who else would pair "open sesame" with "less of me"?), Rodgers swings.

The score percolates with the buoyant, sweet-and-sour pop flavor of the period and with musical jokes that the excellent Rob Fisher and his Coffee Club Orchestra know just how to put over. (Listen to how both a drum and a musical rest are used to reflect the erratic heartbeats of a couple in love.)

Songs that have become endlessly recycled standards (like "This Can't Be Love") acquire a saucy immediacy. Listen to Ms. Luker, as the sweet but worldly-wise wife of the philandering Antipholous of Ephesus (Malcolm Gets), apply her radiant soprano to the gently barbed waltz rhythms of "Falling in Love With Love."

As an enchanting chorus of seamstresses sings velvet-toned back-up, while making dexterous use of a long swath of fabric, the number feels both exactly true to period and freshly minted. (It doesn't hurt that Ms. Luker, with a fetching 1930's hair style, looks like a cover of Photoplay.)

The same spirit, in a different style, registers in a mostly forgotten, hilarious answer to the virile male choral numbers from operettas like "Rose Marie": a hymn to the advantages of being in jail called "Come With Me," in which a line of marching singers (wonderfully led by Patrick Quinn as a police sergeant) exult wittily in their own testosterone.

The roustabout Punch-and-Judy antics and low comedy of the plot, while skillfully performed by Gets, Davis Gaines, Michael McGrath and Mario Cantone as the two sets of twins, still feel labored. And Ms. Marshall's dance routines (Balanchine did the original choreography) are of varying success. But the look of the show, especially Peter Kaczorowski's shifting, multicolored lighting, matches the chromatic verve of the score.

Gaines and Gets bring their resonant tenors to two appealing ballads (although Gets's sliding inflections sound a shade too contemporary). But it's the women who own the show this time, particularly Ms. Luker and Ms. Berry, who give off a disarmingly confectionary sexiness, and the brassier Ms. Gravitte. Julie Halston has a delicious deadpan turn as a courtesan who wears her heart in her manicured fingernails. And where else can you see Marian Seldes, as a seeress with a voice from the crypt, sending up her own sibylline persona?

The first act of the show ends with its goofiest number, a song whose title, "Let Antipholus In," makes up its complete lyrics. The injunction, to admit Mr. Gets into the house he has been locked out of, gets taken up by the entire ensemble in a rhythmic jazz chant that turns into a delirious improvisational song and dance.

The exercise is musical comedy at its most primal: it's balmy, inane and absurdly pleasurable. You could see certain audience members still twitching to its cadences at intermission.

THE BOYS FROM SYRACUSE

Encores! Great American Musicals in Concert. Music by Richard Rodgers; lyrics by Lorenz Hart; book by George Abbott. Directed by Susan H. Schulman. Based on "The Comedy of Errors" by William Shakespeare. Artistic director, Kathleen Marshall. Musical director, Rob Fisher with the Coffee Club Orchestra. Set consultant, John Lee Beatty; choreography by Ms. Marshall; sound by Bruce Cameron; lighting by Peter Kaczorowski; concert adaptation, David Ives; production stage manager, Pete Hanson; apparel coordinator, Toni-Leslie James; original orchestration, Hans Spialek; musical coordinator, Seymour Red Press. Presented by City Center 55th Street Theater Foundation Inc., Judith E. Daykin, president and executive director. At 131 West 55th Street, Manhattan.

WITH: Michael McGrath (Dromio of Ephesus), Malcolm Gets (Antipholus of Ephesus), Davis Gaines (Antipholus of Syracuse), Mario Cantone (Dromio of Syracuse), Debbie Gravitte (Luce), Rebecca Luker (Adriana), Sarah Uriarte Berry (Luciana), Patrick Quinn (Police Sergeant), Julie Halston (Courtesan) and Marian Seldes (Seeress).