Cole Porter Adjacency, With a Few Jolts of Energy

Can-Can at the Paper Mill Playhouse

        The new version of Can-Can, at the Paper Mill Playhouse, directed and significantly edited by the Frasier co-creator David Lee, is buoyed by its near-perfect Cole Porter score but burdened by its lackluster execution.  Indeed, this story of the 1890s Montmarte club owner Pistache (Kate Baldwin) and her former paramour, Judge Aristide Forestier (Jason Danieley), seems to be held up by thin strings for most of the first act.  Ms. Baldwin floats through the production with a smarmy smirk permanently plastered across her face, and Mr. Danieley tries--and fails--to combine the swashbuckling attitudes of Errol Flynn with the lovestruck insecurity of Jimmy Stewart.  Backed by unimaginative sets (by Rob Bissinger), some great, top-of-his-game Porter ("Live and Let Live," "C'est Magnifique") slips by with relatively little fanfare.  It's white-bread, off-the-assembly-line direction by Mr. Lee, and the boring, unfunny book, co-written by Lee and Joel Fields, doesn't help matters.
        That is, until, near the middle of the second act, the cast bursts into the title number, which is not only by far the best song in the production but also one of Cole Porter's best songs ever.  Suddenly, the balanced exuberance that marks the greatest of Porter musicals and numbers is expressed, wildly and well, in the show itself.  The almost insane cleverness of Porter's lyrics is matched by visually inventive choreography by the Tony-winning Patti Colombo (Peter Pan), and the energy level jumps so jarringly it's as if someone has given the show an adrenaline shot.  "Can-Can," the number, seems like a visitor to Can-Can the show from some other, more intelligent production.  Wisely, Mr. Lee has lengthened the song and the dance number for this section of the production, and every second of it is joyous and trascendent.  It was greeted at the performance I attended with a nearly five-minute round of applause, and when, later, a reprise was announced, the theater nearly vibrated off its foundations.  As for me, I would have preferred to see the cast perform "Can-Can" (the song, not the show) continuously for two and a half hours than practically any other conceivable entertainment (including the show itself).  The number alone makes this production worth seeing.
        The phantasmagorical magic of this highlight extends itself over throughout the show, but moments like it are few and far between.  "Come Along With Me," sung by the magnificently sleazy Michael Berresse as villainous critic Hilaire Jussac, is quite a bit of fun, and "Never, Never Be an Artist" is perhaps the one moment of the production in which the comic relief (Greg Hildreth, Mark Price and Justin Robertson as a trio of starving artists) is actually comic.  But one can't escape the fact that the story (and most of Ms. Colombo's non can-can choreography) can sometimes fail to hold the audience's attention.  The most (unfortunately) memorable plot point of the second act comes when Jussac is brought to heel with a calculated reveal that not only makes no sense within the context of the story but also asks the audience to laugh at the character in a way that is summarily uncool.  The fact that this is preceded by one of the most inexpertly choreographed stage fights I've ever seen doesn't help the audience take the contrived happy ending seriously.  When Ms. Baldwin and Mr. Danieley embrace at show's end, the audience isn't interested, the way they should be, in the continuing story of these two lovers.  They're waiting for that final "Can-Can" they've been promised.  And when a single song, however brilliant, is the only thing anchoring a show to plausibility, that show isn't fully formed.  Cole Porter wouldn't be disappointed, but he certainly wouldn't be fascinated either.