One Mo’ Time
Written and directed by Vernel Bagneris. Set design by Campbell Baird. Costumes by Toni-Leslie James. Lighting by John McKernon. Musical direction by Orange Kellin. Choreography by Eddie D. Robinson. With Vernel Bagneris, Roz Ryan, Rosalind Brown, B.J. Crosby, and Wally Dunn. At the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Williamstown, through July 1.

On the Twentieth Century
Book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Music by Cy Coleman. Directed by Julianne Boyd. Choreography by Tony Parise. Set design by Sarah Lambert. Costumes by Fabio Toblini. Lighting by Jeff Croiter. Musical direction by Darren R. Cohen. With Dennis Parlato, Kim Crosby, Joy Franz, John Dewar, Peter Kapetan, and Christopher Yates. At Barrington Stage Company, Sheffield, through July 14.

Amid the rainstorms on the official opening weekend of the Berkshire performance season, all three of the major theaters inaugurated the summer with big, splashy musical comedies. Gilbert & Sullivan lovers (I’m not among that group) can catch H.M.S. Pinafore at the Berkshire Theatre Festival. For those of us drawn to native musical fare, Vernel Bagneris has staged a revival of his 1979 revue One Mo’ Time at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, and Julianne Boyd, Barrington Stage Company’s artistic director, has mounted Comden & Green’s backstage parody On the Twentieth Century.

The joyous One Mo’ Time played for three and a half years at the Village Gate in Greenwich Village, but most people still have no idea who Vernel Bagneris is. Those who’ve seen the film Pennies from Heaven will remember his performance if not his name: he was the Accordion Man who danced to the title song, executing strange, birdlike movements in front of a billboard of Depression-era photographs while the silvery rain glittered down and Steve Martin watched, enchanted, from an Edward Hopper–inspired hash joint. Bagneris is a great dancer with almost superhuman equipment: his waist is about a third of the way down his body, and he doesn’t appear to have any bones at all.

He’s also a historian of black vaudeville and jazz. He wrote and directed One Mo’ Time and its sequel, Further Mo’, both of which string slight backstage plots — really an excuse for some good raucous jokes — around a joyous line-up of honky-tonk tunes. One Mo’ Time is set in the legendary black vaudeville house the Lyric in 1926 New Orleans, where a small troupe of performers light up the stage while, in their cramped single dressing room between numbers, they outfox the parsimonious white club owner (Wally Dunn). This isn’t Spike Lee territory: though the Theater Owners Backing Association (TOBA), which was founded in 1920 and booked the Lyric among many other Southern and Western houses, was notorious for its treatment of artists (its acronym was popularly reinterpreted to stand for “tough on black asses”), Bagneris isn’t a bitter commentator — the racial comedy is good-natured, and it’s relayed in comic-strip style. We’re not in George C. Wolfe territory, either: Bagneris celebrates these big-hearted entertainers as opposed to turning them into race traitors, the way Wolfe did with Jelly Roll Morton and others in Jelly’s Last Jam.

There’s the big, barrel-chested headliner, Bertha (Roz Ryan), a diva; the wised-up old-timer Ma Reed (B.J. Crosby), a Thelma Ritter type; eagle-eyed up-and-comer Thelma (Rosalind Brown), who covets Bertha’s best songs; and the sole man, Papa Du (Bagneris), who doubles as company manager. They execute more than two dozen numbers: sizzling blues like “C.C Rider”; ballads of sexual braggadocio, ripe with double entendres, like “Kitchen Man”; strutting love songs like “Everybody Loves My Baby”; poker-faced novelties like “He’s in the Jailhouse Now”; and dance ditties like “Wait Till You See My Baby Do the Charleston.” And they bring down the house. (The sensational band, under the direction of clarinettist Orange Kellin, has Wendell Brunious on trumpet, Conal Fowkes on piano, Walter Payton Jr. on tuba, and Kenneth Sara on drums.)

Bagneris, with his sweet rasp of a voice and his uncanny, buttery dance style, is so relaxed on stage that you’d be tempted to call him languid if his timing weren’t so razor-sharp. Rosalind Brown matches flirtatious kewpie-doll moves to spun-toffee vocals, delivering songs like “He’s Funny That Way” and “I’ve Got What It Takes” with easy precision. B.J. Crosby is on hand for been-around-the-block lyrics like “After You’ve Gone” and “C.C. Rider.” And the formidable Roz Ryan, a true blues belter, specializes in sexual fables like “Don’t Turn Your Back on Me” and “(You’ve Got the) Right Key But the Wrong Keyhole” — songs that, in the most colorful metaphors, warn flawed lovers to shape up.

It’s a sublime entertainment, with an inventive set by Campbell Baird and shimmering ’20s outfits by Toni-Leslie James. The nightclub show’s 11 o’clock number is a rendition of “Muddy Water” by Crosby that Ryan echoes from the dressing room, so that the sentiment of the song — a longing for a Delta homecoming — becomes simultaneously a vaudeville showstopper and the expression of the real emotions of the characters. This knockout is followed by “A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” one of the most rousing songs in the popular American repertory. The Williamstown audience was on its feet before the finale was complete.

On the Twentieth Century should have been another treat. I saw Tom Pappas’s production at the Goodspeed Opera House a couple of seasons ago, and it was a revelation: a genuine madcap musical that, though it ran on Broadway for more than a year (it opened in 1978), never got its due. The Cy Coleman music is mediocre, but the Comden & Green libretto, derived from the classic 1934 screwball movie Twentieth Century (and two Broadway comedies that sired it), is in the pair’s best lunatic style.

On the Twentieth Century is one of the few musicals I can think of (The Producers is another) that’s conceived almost entirely in terms of comic production numbers. It doesn’t stand still for ballads — even the ballads are jokes, since they’re performed by narcissists. The setting is a train: the famously elegant art-deco Twentieth Century Limited, on the Chicago-New York segment of its cross-country run. In the course of 16 hours, before the train winds up in Manhattan, down-and-out producer/director Oscar Jaffee has to resurrect his career by persuading Oscar-winning actress Lily Garland — whom he discovered, made into a star, fell in love with, and split with acrimoniously — to return to the stage. The role he offers her is Mary Magdalene, no less, and the backer, found in transit by Oscar’s ulcerated sidekicks (his press agent and his company manager), is a religious fanatic named Mrs. Primrose who claims to have millions at her fingertips.

This isn’t an easy musical to perform; it has to be played at breakneck speed and with impeccable style. Unfortunately, Julianne Boyd’s production doesn’t have either. Everything about it is a little clunky, from the overripe performances to the scenic and costume designs by, respectively, Sarah Lambert and Fabio Toblini. (Lambert’s set has one particularly ugly moving piece — the front of the train — that looks as if it had come from a high-school production.) Although Boyd has scuttled the opening moments of the play, a Jaffee production of the Joan of Arc story that shuts down in mid performance, the show still seems to take a long time to start. And since the actors substitute overacting for pace, it dawdles when it should be chugging ahead like that resolute train.

Dennis Parlato, who plays the self-adoring scam artist, a sort of foxy peacock, has evidently watched John Barrymore’s famous performance in the movie, but his choices are too obvious, and he doesn’t seem cast right. As Lily (née Mildred Plotka), Kim Crosby sings well but misses the joke — she plays this nutcake of a part, which was rendered in the movie by Carole Lombard and on Broadway by Madeline Kahn, far too straight. When Oscar (in a flashback) puts the newly reborn Lily on stage in his musical spectacle to sing, “Véronique, she close her door/And start the Franco-Prussian War,” and when his Mutt & Jeff minions (played without much distinction by John Dewar and Peter Kapetan) beg her to consider teaming up with him again and she answers with a song called “Never,” the character — and the musical — need to leap into inspired madness. Crosby either can’t manage it or wasn’t directed to. As Letitia Primrose, Joy Franz (in the Imogene Coca part) is shrill rather than dotty. Only Christopher Yates, as Lily’s movie-hunk paramour, Bruce Granit, comes close to the style: he appears to have the requisite gift for physical comedy, though his bits are poorly staged and he’s victimized by his clothes. A few sequences come off: the “She’s a Nut” song in mid-second act (built around Mrs. Primrose), a surefire number, is funny; there’s a good bit involving oversized pens in “Sign, Lily, Sign”; and I liked the moment when Oscar, faking his own suicide, rolls off a bar onto a pair of stools. Otherwise this is a disappointing venture — all wind and no sails.

Issue Date: June 28- July 5, 2001