Encores @ City Center - Grand Hotel

[edjames]

Grand Hotel, The Musical

Mar 21 – 25, 2018

 

Tickets start at $35

 

Encores!

• A faded ballerina, a Baron who moonlights as a burglar, a dying bookkeeper, a businessman facing certain ruin, and a young secretary all-too-eager to become an American film star are all trapped by history, as the world careens into a great depression, and the revolving door keeps turning.
   
  Grand Hotel, The Musical features music and lyrics by Robert Wright and George Forrest, a book by Luther Davis, and additional music and lyrics by Maury Yeston. When the show opened on Broadway in 1989 it was a hit—winning five Tony awards and running for 1,017 performances.
   
  Book your reservation for the mysterious and luxurious Grand Hotel, The Musical.
  

Cast & Credits

Book by Luther Davis

Music and Lyrics by Robert Wright and George Forrest

Based on Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel

By arrangement with Turner Broadcasting Co., owner of the motion picture Grand Hotel

Additional Music and Lyrics by Maury Yeston

Featuring The Encores! Orchestra

Encores! Artistic Director Jack Viertel

Encores! Music Director Rob Berman

Directed and Choreographed by Josh Rhodes

Starring Junior Cervila, John Clay III, Natascia Diaz, John Dossett, Irina Dvorvenko, Guadalupe Garcia, Nehal Joshi, James T. Lane, Jamie LaVerdiere, Eric Leviton, Robert Montano, Kevin Pariseau, William Ryall, James Snyder, Brandon Uranowitz, Daniel Yearwood

With Aaron J. Albano, Matt Bauman, Kate Chapman, Sara Esty, Hannah Florence, Richard Gatta, Emily Kelly, Andrew Kruep, Kelly Methven, Harris Milgrim, Adam Roberts, Christopher Trepinski, Sharrod Williams

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

Reading this made me remember the brilliant performance that Brent Barrett gave in the original run

[edjames]

For me, two people stood out I the original production. The first, Michael Jeter, who won a Tony as best Featured Actor in a Musical, and secondly, the wonderfully talented Liliane Montevecchi, who was nominated for a Tony. Memorable performances.

[+ Cash4Trash]

Reading this made me remember the brilliant performance that Brent Barrett gave in the original run

Benjamin - you're an escort. You shouldn't admit to having seen the original run of anything.

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

Benjamin - you're an escort. You shouldn't admit to having seen the original run of anything.

 

That doesn't necessarily make me old: I had parents who took me to Broadway shows from the time I was 7

 

Grand Hotel was 1990. While I don't remember a ton about that OBC, I do remember the very memorable performance of Barrett.

[+ sf westcoaster]

Grand Hotel opened at the Martin Beck Theatre (now the Al Hirschfeld) on November 12, 1989 and ran for 1,018 performances. My sources do not show Brent Barrett as one of the original cast members, but that is not to say that he didn't appear. He did replace Tom Wopat in the 1999 revival of Annie Get Your Gun, with Bernadette Peters.

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

Grand Hotel opened at the Martin Beck Theatre (now the Al Hirschfeld) on November 12, 1989 and ran for 1,018 performances. My sources do not show Brent Barrett as one of the original cast members, but that is not to say that he didn't appear. He did replace Tom Wopat in the 1999 revival of Annie Get Your Gun, with Bernadette Peters.

 

He replaced a very sick David Carroll not long after the show opened.

 

Carroll was actually recording the cast album when he collapsed and died. Very sad story.

[RyanDean]

Brent Barrett with the incomparable Michael Jeter.

 

I saw the original -- vivid memories of Karen Akers singing from a frame/box on stage left.

[edjames]

Seeing this tonite.

 

Review: Divine Decadence Revisited in ‘Grand Hotel’

ENCORES! � GRAND HOTEL, THE MUSICAL

• Off Broadway, Musical
   
  
• 1 hr. and 45 min.
   
  
• Closing Date: March 25, 2018
   
  
• City Center, 131 W. 55th St.
  

 

By BEN BRANTLEYMARCH 22, 2018

Irina Dvorovenko as an aging ballerina and James Snyder as an aristocratic thief in the Encores! production of “Grand Hotel” at City Center.

“I’m so nervous. Why?” Tommy Tune, a tower of sartorial splendor in pinstripes and denim, asked at City Center on Wednesday night. “Guess it’s because my baby’s walking without me.”

 

Mr. Tune, the fabled Texas-born showman, was speaking as a member of the opening-night audience for the six-performance Encores! revival of “Grand Hotel, the Musical.” And while this singing, sighing adaptation of Vicki Baum’s 1929 novel about desperate characters in Weimar Berlin has the usual official roster (credited and uncredited) of book and song writers, it has indeed always been regarded as Mr. Tune’s baby.

 

When it opened on Broadway in 1989, after a long and laborious gestation, “Grand Hotel” was acclaimed as a triumph of stagecraft over substance. Few critics seemed thrilled by the songs, the story or even the performances.

 

What sent them into swoons was the look of the show (Tony Walton did the set) and the fluid, endlessly inventive mise-en-scène provided by Mr. Tune, its director and choreographer. “Grand Hotel” went on to run for more than 1,000 performances, a testament to the selling power of creative camouflage.

 

As such, “Grand Hotel” might seem an odd choice for Encores!, which began its life 25 years ago under the rubric of “Great American Musicals in Concert.” In theory, at least, it’s not what you see that counts most at Encores!, but what you hear — preferably some gorgeous, neglected and impeccably performed score of yesteryear.

 

Center, Mr. Snyder, left, and Brandon Uranowitz in the show. The two performed a death-defying Charleston in “We’ll Take a Glass Together.”

Still, ever since its minimalist interpretation of “Chicago” slid from City Center to Broadway in 1996, Encores! has been inching ever further into the realm of full-dress productions. As overseen by the director and choreographer Josh Rhodes, with a set by Allen Moyer and costumes by Linda Cho, this “Grand Hotel” is one of the most sumptuous pieces of eye candy ever to glitter from the City Center stage.

 

• As for what churns beneath its opulent surface, it’s still a rather dreary slog. But perhaps that’s appropriate for a show about fatal illusions of glamour in a dark and decaying world.
  

 

The basis of

, starring Greta Garbo and John Barrymore, Baum’s novel was a paradigm of the oft-recycled formula that assembles disparate, doomed souls in a single (preferably high-toned) setting and sets them on a collision course (“Ship of Fools,” “Murder on the Orient Express”). In the late 1950s, the team of Luther Davis (book) and Robert Wright and George Forrest (songs) did a stillborn adaptation that closed in San Francisco.

 

Those are the names that are still appended most prominently beneath the title of “Grand Hotel, the Musical.” But when Mr. Tune took on the assignment of artificially resuscitating the show in the late 1980s, he brought in the veteran Broadway composer Maury Yeston (who collaborated with Mr. Tune on “Nine”) and book writer Peter Stone to add snap and sex appeal.

 

Mostly, though, it was Mr. Tune and his design team that made this “Hotel” seem like a four-star establishment. His production told simultaneous, overlapping stories of unraveling lives by keeping its cast in perpetual, precision-tooled motion. And don’t underestimate the appeal of the show’s time and place — Berlin, 1928 — which immediately summoned memories of the sinister Broadway blockbuster “Cabaret.”

 

The Encores! “Grand Hotel,” which deploys what feels like a city-size ensemble, is similarly perfumed in divine decadence. It retains some elements of Mr. Tune’s original staging, including the use of portable, gold wooden chairs, reconfigured in different patterns.

 

Heléne Yorke, far right, who plays a poor but ambitious typist in “Grand Hotel, the Musical.”

This production also includes — in addition to the requisite crystal chandeliers and sepulchral lighting (by Ken Billington) — a central red-carpeted staircase that seems to be waiting for Dolly Levi. As in the original, the orchestra (fluidly led, as usual, by Rob Berman) is visibly perched above the action, pouring out weltschmerz-laden melodies that flow like a thick, high-proof dessert wine.

 

The hotel’s population of guests look fab in their period glad rags. They include an over-the-hill ballet star (Irina Dvorovenko, in the Garbo part) who falls in love with an aristocratic thief (Barrymore’s role, played by James Snyder); a poor but ambitious typist (Heléne Yorke), working for a lecherous tycoon on the verge of bankruptcy (John Dossett); and a consumptive Jewish clerk (Brandon Uranowitz) who wants to live, live, live before he expires.

 

As they embody various degrees of love, lust and last-ditch deceptions, a cynical morphine-addicted doctor (William Ryall) oversees the proceedings. “People come, people go,” he observes, immortally. “Look at them — living the high life! But time is running out.” Small wonder that when “Forbidden Broadway” did its (priceless) parody, it was called “Grim Hotel.”

 

Mr. Rhodes’s production isn’t grim, but it’s oddly uninvolving, and only some of the many cast members emanate the vivid magnetism that is a musical’s life blood. They include Ms. Yorke (who has the period glamour poses down pat), Mr. Uranowitz, Mr. Dossett, John Clay III as a beleaguered hotel employee and, as a pair of terpsichorean bartenders, James T. Lane and Daniel Yearwood.

 

Ms. Dvorovenko, who was a star of the American Ballet Theater (and a smash in the Encores! “On Your Toes”), seems too fresh and frisky to portray an aging diva. As her aristocratic suitor, Mr. Snyder has a gleaming trumpet of a tenor. But he generates the most chemistry with Mr. Uranowitz, with whom he performs a death-defying Charleston in the production’s high point, “We’ll Take a Glass Together.”

 

Mr. Rhodes is a skilled traffic cop, and his choreography is appropriately restless and stylish throughout, though this is not the kind of show to make you feel like dancing. Its prevailing tone, of cautionary camp, is made clear when, early on, the cast forms a confrontational line at the stage’s rim.

 

“Look at us!” they seem to be saying. “We are so beautiful and so damned. Envy us! Pity us!” Think of it as a glossy tabloid set to swelling violins.

[edjames]

It was a truly entertaining production with a wonderful cast. Brought back many memories of the original and spending time with Ms. Montevecchi backstage at the Martin Beck Theater.

 

Oddly, and I guess they did not want to interrupt the continuity of the show, but no intermission. 1 hour and 45 minutes is a long time to sit.

[foxy]

Saw the show this afternoon. It took me a little while to get into it. It does have a very large cast and it’s constantly moving so best to not let your mind wander. You have to learn whose who.

The Charleston scene will certainly get your blood racing. Brandon Uranowitz and James Snyder ( who has a wonderful voice ) made great dance partners.

And speaking of dance partners, Guadalupe Garcia and Junior Cervila as the Countess and the Gigolo, give great hot tango throughout the show and continue even after the cast has taken their bows.