Review - On the Twentieth Century

When I moved back for my second go-round in New York, I worked for a pager company and made pretty good money with excellent bonuses.  You'll be shocked, I'm sure, to hear that I spent my bonuses on theater.  I bought subscriptions to most of the not-for-profit companies around town.  One of those companies was Roundabout.  In 1997, I was excited to see Bill Irwin in a new adaptation (written by Irwin) of Moliere's Scapin.  I love Bill Irwin.  Anyway, I don't remember much of that production - I have vague memories of enjoying Irwin and seeing Christopher Evan Welch on stage for the first time and finding him fantastic.  And I have a memory of a cute little blonde girl who was very quirky and funny. 

I saw Steel Pier later that season and hey, there was that cute little blonde girl again!  And she was again very funny.  But when I saw Kristin Chenoweth for the third time, as Sally in the revival of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, I said to my gentleman friend, 'that girl is a STAR and is going to win the Tony!'  I'm not often right, but that time...I was.

Every time I see Kristin Chenoweth on stage, I'm freshly amazed at how superhumanly gifted a performer she is.  She can seemingly do it all - comedy, emotion, dance, and oh, that heavenly singing voice.  When she was announced as the lead in Roundabout's new revival of On the Twentieth Century, I knew I wanted to check it out.  And with Peter Gallagher as her leading man, I was doubly in.  Happily, my boss needed a Tony seat guest this afternoon and off we went.

I am familiar with the legend of the original production of On the Twentieth Century, and I've seen the 1934 film on which this musical is based many times, but I didn't know the score at all.  I have one song on my iPhone, but only because it was a duet between John Collum and Kevin Kline.  So I was going into the American Airlines Theater today as a pretty blank slate.

I had a very fun time at On the Twentieth Century - I thought it was frothy, goofy, silly fun, performed with brio and a lot of joie de vivre.  I could hear the singular voices of Comden and Green in the delicious lyrics and lines in the script and Cy Coleman's score was a terrific pastiche of operetta and light comedy.  

photo credit: Joan Marcus

The show is a screwball comedy, with down-on-his-luck empresario Oscar Jaffee (fantastically played by Peter Gallagher, who had missed a bunch of previews because of a lingering illness; he sounded [and looked] terrific to me today) taking the train from Chicago to New York because he heard his former lover, and now silver-screen goddess, Lily Garland would also be on the train.  The train from Chicago to New York takes sixteen hours to arrive and Oscar was planning to use those sixteen hours to get Lily to agree to appear in his next play.  And the, of course...hey, finally a show where 'wacky hijinks ensue' is actually true!

Chenowith as Lily really pulls out all the stops - she's terrifically funny without mugging, she sings like a dream (a lot of the music utilizes the upper reaches of her voice and she trills thrillingly), she even dances AND makes you care about Lily as a person.  You can see the frustration she has with her life alongside the overwhelming ego she also has.  Everyone knows Oscar and Lily belong together and the fun is waiting for them to realize it too.

photo credit: Joan Marcus

Andy Karl, who was really good in last year's Rocky, plays Lily's current boyfriend, the rather dim but magnificently brawny Bruce.  He's very good here, too, but perhaps a little light in the vaingloriousness the role requires.  But when he's practically bench-pressing Chenowith to show off his muscles, he's pretty goshdarn funny.  Mark Linn-Baker and Michael McGrath are very drolly funny as Oscar's henchmen and Mary Louise Wilson is a riot as Mrs. Primrose.  At first you wonder why she seems to be underplaying so much, but hello, when her inner crazy comes out in the second act, watch out!  She was hyterical!

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the four gentlemen who play the Porters - terrific tap dancers and singers all, who guide the audience through the show beautifully.  And their second act tap number to "Life is Like a Train" is truly grand.  They may have gotten the biggest hand at the curtain call, though the matinee audience was eating the show up throughout.  I had a couple of celebrities in front of me, Kathie Lee Gifford and Hank Azaria (not together).  Azaria was the first one on his feet for curtain call.  I also had a toddler next to me, god love her.  Why her parents brought her to a two-and-a-half hour musical that's rather all about the clever wordplay is beyond me.  She was pretty good, though, and finally fell asleep in the middle of the second act.

The show is maybe twenty minutes too long (there are sometimes too many verses inside individual songs for my tastes) and the small-ish orchestra did sound small-ish when a larger sound would be better.  I also read that there are seven fewer performers in the revival than there were in the origianl company - that was an issue, too.  A lot of these ensemble performers had very distinct faces and they were playing lots of different characters in a short amount of time, which got to be a tad confusing now and then.  But these are quibbles when there's so much laughter and fun going on in the show as a whole.  The set and costumes are great and the cast is having a swell time, which helps everyone else have a swell time, too.  You should get over to the American Airlines Theater to see Kristin Chenoweth add another theatrical notch to her belt - you won't be sorry you did...