City Center Encores! 2023-24 season: PAL JOEY • ONCE UPON A MATTRESS • JELLY'S LAST JAM • TITANIC — Page 6

I wish Jesse Green would stop referring to "the usual City Center problem of under-rehearsal...."

Imagine how much better "Into The Woods", "Chicago", "On The Town", "No, No Nanette", "Most Happy Fella" and "Gypsy" would have been if they'd had more rehearsal time.

Pal Joey seems to have been in development for a number of years. The problem with this production is not the lack of rehearsal time. The problem is that it is misbegotten.

Jordan Catalano said: "Just getting home. I...I...don't even know what to say.

Was it worse than "The Life"? No.Was it good? No. Is it worth $200 a ticket just to see Loretta Devine? Yes.

Just a confounding production. This isn't "Pal Joey", so why bother tricking people into thinking that's what they're getting. If this is the story you want to tell, get the rights from the Rodgers & Hart estate to do a jukebox show with their music and tell it. Just so so many weird choices here. And I didn't even "hate" act one but lots of people in the audience did and they were very vocal about it during intermission. But act two - Oy. That was a HOT MESS. 15 minutes worth of plot expanded to an hour with songs and dancing that didn't do anything for the plot.


But I'd waited my whole life to see Loretta onstage and she didn't disappoint. She was just as wonderful AND FUNNY as I knew she would be. Someone, anyone, PLEEEEEEASE get a good show for this lady to be in and pay her whatever she wants to do a GOOD show."

I agree with you word for word, Jordan. I was there tonight, too. I think Loretta Devine was the saving grace for me of the whole night - I've loved her since I saw her several times in the original DREAMGIRLS in 1982, and it was a delight to see and hear her - so genuinely funny and heartfelt...and she knows how to put across a song....

The sound was so freakin weird! Band louder than the singers, singing was often unintelligible, Elizabeth Stanley ruined Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered (she lost some of the very best lines Hart ever wrote!)....

The whole thing mystified me...

These reactions are killing me. Paid too much for these seats and mad about it now.

I didn’t notice any real straining on her part last night (I could be wrong) so maybe they adjusted after Wednesday night?

Some of the musical arrangements are excellent. Much of the cast is good. But overall this is an inert revision. Linda has WAY too much material and none of it is justified. Vera’s role has been reduced to this man-hungry, villainous widow. Joey isn’t a “heel,” he’s just ambitious and cheats on his girlfriend one time to get ahead. The book scenes are way too long & rambly. Brooks can’t make Zip work. The ensemble’s new function is odd.

But then, towards the end of Act 1, it’s like someone turns on a lightswitch in the form of Elizabeth Stanley’s exquisite BEWITCHED, in which she wrings out every emotion of Hart’s lyric. The musical arrangement is superb, too. It’s followed by a scene with some actual juice -- and some of the most raw sexual chemistry I’ve seen on stage in a while. In any other show this might not have had such an impact, but after an hour I was finally FEELING something.

Their chemistry returns in act 2 for her only other song (I Didn’t Know What Time It Was), in which they again do a sexy dance, but then the show goes back to being inert.

Makes me wonder if the creative team hadn’t been entirely men, maybe we wouldn’t have all these Vera and Linda problems. But we might still have the Joey problem.

Updated On: 11/3/23 at 09:36 AM

toetapper2 said: "I wish Jesse Green would stop referring to "the usual City Center problem of under-rehearsal...."

There should have been a lot of things figured out for the staging & book in their pre-NYCC workshops. But there are also scene transitions that are way too long, light cues that are blatantly off, sound problems, etc...things that we do have to chock up to not enough tech rehearsal time for their ambitions.

Thinking back to other NYCC Gala Presentations, there's often a feeling of chaos. I don't know if that's because they try to be more ambitious than a regular Encores show, or if it's the lack of Encores leadership oversight, or what.

2022 -- Parade -- the bones of the show were there but it had set/sound/staging issues that were resolved on Broadway. The NYT review was very kind and helpful in overlooking elements.

2019 -- Evita -- a poor staging. Tried to run it for 2 weeks and it did not sell at all.

2018 -- A Chorus Line -- just a regurgitation of the 2007 revival

2017 -- Brigadoon -- far and away the best one they've done, and I never heard so much as a whisper of a transfer.

2016 -- Sunday in the Park -- this was mainly an unstaged, uncostumed park-and-bark concert. There was a lot of potential there (like with Parade), but Jake didn't sound nearly as good as he did on Bway.

2015 -- Annie Get Your Gun (Megan Hilty, Andy Karl) -- this one wasn't bad, it just had no ambitions beyond being a concert and underlined the limitations of the material.

2014 -- The Band Wagon -- awful; was aimed for Broadway but died at NYCC

Updated On: 11/3/23 at 10:18 AM

toetapper2 said: "Just bring back the Encores! Bash for a two night benefit."

I assume they want 6-7 nights of ticket sales.

A full show probably generates more interest, usually (a "star-studded" concert or revue is all too common nowadays).

Partnering with a commercial producer (as they have for a number of these Gala presentations) offsets the production costs and allows them to produce somewhat more populist shows that might not otherwise get an Encores presentation - though now the original Encores mission is kind of a thing of the past.

The success of ENCORES and musicals at City Center has become a major contributor to the organization's fiscal health, and as we've seen from new programming decisions, they've come to rely much more heavily on Encores (and Encores-style MT presentations like this). There's now a VP of Musical Theatre (Jenny Gersten) on the NYCC exec level to whom the Encores AD reports.

Updated On: 11/3/23 at 12:33 PM

ErmengardeStopSniveling said: "I want to know if the original program-printing was a goof of including the wrong song list, or if they actually overhauled the book and cut a bunch of songs since it went to print (which was probably about 2 weeks ago). I don't have the program in front of me right now but there's a huge difference from the song list in the printed Playbill vs what's on the paper insert."

I also noticed (on Wednesday at least) the song progression in the actual performance didn’t adhere to either printed song list (at least in Act 2).

Does anyone have the QR code link? I didn't see it posted anywhere on Wednesday night.

MemorableUserName said: "InnerMonologue commented on that on Page 4:

"Yes, last night's dress started around 7:40p and ended around 10:20p. Tony Goldwyn and Savion Glover briefly spoke pre-show and explained that the song list was changing up to a few hours beforehand, so we should use the provided QR code to see the most updated song list, instead of what was printed on the handout. Seems like a lot of active edits happening.""

This is really strange to me...

Kad said: "It is insanethat such major changes were being instituted so late for something like this."

This type of thing can happen when you don't have a seasoned director at the helm. The director's the one who needs to be driving "no more changes." Goldwyn's a solid actor and Glover is one of the best dancers & choreographers alive, but neither has directed a show of this scale and the collab seems like kind of a shotgun wedding.

Or, if it was a runtime problem, they should have been aware of that on paper or at the first readthrough.

I feel bad for the cast in any situation like that. They must have been anxious as hell on Tuesday and Wednesday. Changes of that scale on a tight timeline can also be safety hazards.