The Band Wagon at City Center
The Encores production of The Band Wagon, playing at City Center through November 16th, is so close to being a good show it almost hurts. Boasting a starry cast including Brian Stokes Mitchell, Laura Osnes, and Tracy Ullman, a much-loved score by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz, and backstage guidance from director/choreographer Kathleen Marshall and writer Douglas Carter Beane (who has greatly edited the script), it has created much anticipation in the very specific crowd that follow Encores' fall "special events." But robbed of the blinding Technicolor and magnetic cast of the MGM film on which it's based, the quote-unquote "new and improved" Band Wagon is disappointing in its lethargy.
The cast is not on its game. Mr. Mitchell, always entertaining but vainly struggling to fill the enormous tap shoes of Fred Astaire, could use a better torch song than this score has to offer. (He's not much of a dancer, either.) Ms. Osnes' character is held back so much by her reduced storyline that even her stellar range is not enough to make her performance memorable. Many other supporting roles (those of Ms. Ullman and Michael McKean as a composing team and Michael Berresse as a modern choreographer come to mind) bring some welcome realism into this cream puff but eventually become tiresome as they strain to stay relevant in the quickly dissolving story. It is left mostly to the hugely entertaining Australian Tony Sheldon (as British director Jeffery Cordoba) to inject a little excitement into the cast, which he does for most of the show, but there's only so much anyone can do when the overall mood is resignation to the subpar material.
Mostly, that's due to the score, which, really, is not all that good. Though Mr. Schwartz is a halfway decent composer, Mr. Dietz is only a sporadically inspired lyricist. ("That's Entertainment" and "Dancing in the Dark" are arguably the only two professional-level numbers in the piece.) And Mr. Beane's new book suffers from the same ills as did his previous new books for existent musicals, Xanadu and Cinderella. His librettos are often so blindingly sunny and grinningly self-referential that they desert substance altogether. Though his most recent straight play, The Nance, was an altogether satisfying backstage story, Mr. Beane does not bring the same subtlety to musicals, and doesn't leave much worthwhile story to work with in his wake. As always in Beane's work, the most obviously effeminate character (despite being straight in the original material) turns out to be gay and is immediately accepted by everyone, theater in-jokes (permanently soured for me by the atrocious It's Only a Play) are tossed around, and a happy ending is unjustifiably reached, leaving everyone dissatisfied. Meanwhile, Ms. Marshall's choreography, normally stylish and exciting, doesn't discredit Mr. Astaire's memory so much as it seems to have forgotten it.
Never in my theatergoing career have I seen a musical that so clearly should be delightful and yet isn't. The music may be familiar (a smattering of applause erupted at the beginning of "I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plan" that seemed louder than the applause at the end) and the actors normally sublime, but something is off here; something is rotten, as Jeffery Cordoba might say as Hamlet near the beginning of the show, in the state of Denmark. The show doesn't leave the audience walking on air, but it doesn't leave them walking out depressed, either. It just leaves them walking out.
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