High Button Shoes

[edjames]

the final season production at NY City Center encores! series was high Button Shoe.

ben Brantley's review was good, and provides some background information on the original production.

it has outstanding credits. Julie Styne and Sammy Cahn wrote the music. Jerome Robbins did the choreography. Phil Silvers was the star.

Despite all this, I said "meh" after seeing last night's show.

The music is nice, but nothing great. The choreography was disappointing.

The cast was good but aside from the ever delightful Michael Urie (who should have toned down the Phil Silvers imitation!). Kevin Chamberlein ws a bit disappointing.

 

Review: A Con Man Without a Sting in ‘High Button Shoes’

Were you left feeling chafed by those harsh, hot winds sweeping through this season’s revisionist, Tony-nominated production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!”? Are you longing for a revival that lets a cheerful old American musical remain its cheerful old self, with any inner darkness undisclosed?

Theatergoers of this mind may well find solace in the twinkly “High Button Shoes,” a nearly forgotten frolic from the late-1940s that is occupying New York City Center this weekend, with a cast led by the indefatigable Michael Urie. The last of this season’s Encores! musicals in concert has the approximate fizz and flavor of a vanilla egg cream.

That’s perhaps as it should be for a show that was regarded as a chipper, mindless throwback even when it opened in 1947. This was four years after “Oklahoma!” first startled audiences with its visions of brave new possibilities for psychological depth in the American musical and two years after the brooding “Carousel,” also from Rodgers and Hammerstein, opened on Broadway.

“Eschewing progress in the arts for the moment,” the critic Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times, “the producers of ‘High Button Shoes’ have put together a very happy musical show in a very cheerful tradition.” For Atkinson, this “affable” work summoned the high jinks of vaudeville, burlesque and peppy college-themed fare of yore, and he described the score — by the Broadway neophytes Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn — as “very pleasant to hear, like a well-oiled hurdy-gurdy.”

That’s not an assessment to make the heart beat faster, but it captures the escapist, anodyne appeal that “Shoes” must have had for Americans still recovering from World War II. Directed by the veteran hitmaker George Abbott, with an episodic, joke-packed book by Stephen Longstreet, it was the longest-running show to open that year, outstripping “Brigadoon” and “Finian’s Rainbow.”

This tale of a hapless but relentless con man, played by the brassy comic Phil Silvers, was set in 1913, before America had entered its first World War. It was a time, according to “Shoes,” when to do the tango was considered the height of sensual abandon. The good news for dance lovers was that such a tango — along with other numbers that included a ballet in the rambunctious vein of a Mack Sennett silent comedy — was choreographed by Jerome Robbins.

Robbins’s early style has been dexterously channeled by the choreographer Sarah O’Gleby in the City Center “High Button Shoes,” which is directed by John Rando. And that “Bathing Beauty Ballet” — a Keystone Kops chase sequence of meticulously calibrated frenzy, set in Atlantic City, which is recreated here as a near facsimile of the original — remains a vivifying, showstopping delight.

Otherwise, the charms of this “Shoes” are of a hazy strain, despite its detours into antic sequences involving bird watchers, Texas cowboys (and a chorus line of winsome cows) and the Rutgers football team. The entire production seems to take place under a double glaze of nostalgia — of remembering a more innocent time’s remembrance of a more innocent time.

Designed by Allen Moyer (sets), Ann Hould-Ward (costumes) and Ken Billington (lighting), the production creates a bright, daytime world in which sunshine comes in shades of ice-cream parlor pastels. Its plot was already a staple of American entertainment and would be recycled many times on Broadway, perhaps most successfully in “The Music Man.”

A captivating con man (here named Harrison Floy) descends on a guileless American town (New Brunswick, N.J.), charms and fleeces its inhabitants and (spoiler alert) is forgiven by the final curtain because he is, after all, so darn irresistible. Floy must have been a perfect fit for Silvers, a graduate of burlesque who had

.

Mr. Urie — the winning comic actor who starred in the recent revival of Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song” — offers a bright, tooth-flashing facsimile of the Silvers grin here. He also has the rim-shot-inspiring vaudeville delivery down cold, and he remains as Gumby-like as ever.

It must be said that he has only a touch-and-go relationship with a melody line. More crucially, he lacks the streak of shiny malice that gave an edge to Silvers’s clowning. Mr. Urie gives a characteristically skillful performance, but it feels pasted on.

Kevin Chamberlin brings his always welcome, sheepish air of bonhomie to the part of Floy’s sidekick and accomplice, Mr. Pontdue. And the talented crew portraying their patsies includes Matt Loehr, Chester Gregory, Mylinda Hull, Aidan Alberto and, as the fresh-faced, sweet-voiced young lovers, Marc Koeck and Carla Duren.

Playing the young suburban matriarch Sara Longstreet (a role originated by Nanette Fabray), Betsy Wolfe creates a precise and surprisingly subtle comic portrait, a mix of self-effacing gentility and aggressive ambition. She’s delightful leading an ensemble of fine-feathered local ladies in “Bird Watcher’s Song,” or dancing a deft soft shoe with Mr. Gregory in “I Still Get Jealous” (the other number, along with “Bathing Beauty Ballet,” that replicates Robbins’s choreography).

That ballet aside, none of the musical numbers land with the impact that makes audiences clap their hands raw, although I enjoyed Mr. Loehr’s and Ms. Hull’s artfully awkward take on the tango. And the jokes are more likely to make you smile politely than laugh out loud. (When Pontdue says that cockatoo mate for life, Floy answers, “They must be exhausted.”)

The music is genially, forgettably melodic, featuring no songs that have gone on to immortality as cabaret standards. This was the first Broadway outing for Styne, who would later create far more memorable songs for shows that included “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and the deathless “Gypsy.”</p><p>His score for “Shoes” is rendered here with a swoony lushness by the wonderful Encores! orchestra, conducted by Rob Berman. But it seems to evaporate even as you listen. Like the production as a whole, it somehow reminds you of a generic host of golden-age musicals without ever staking a claim to its own unassailable identity.</p></div></div>

[edjames]

Sorry folks, that post got away from me and before I had a chance to edit it and spellcheck it, it went out!

[Doe Be Doe]

oI saw High Button Shoes Friday night. It was fun but not memorable. I really like Michael Urie. He is very talented. I did think he looked just like Phil Silvers and that as before I knew that Phil Silvers starred in the original production. On the whole a nice evening but not one to repeat.