BWW Reviews: A Flawless AIN'T MISBEHAVIN' Plays Washington Savoyards

It isn't often a reviewer gets to write about a flawless performance, and to be honest, on those occasions the resulting review may not make for the most scintillating reading.  Unvaried praise can be boring.  So as a writer who likes to be entertaining it is with mixed emotions that I have to report having seen Ain't Misbehavin' done flawlessly.  The perpetrators are the Washington Savoyards, holding forth at the Atlas Performing Arts Center on H Street, N.E.  (Very accessible to my Baltimore readers.)

A frequently-revived classic of the modern musical stage, as the world knows, Ain't Misbehavin' is a revue of songs by Thomas "Fats" Waller (1904-1943), composer, pianist, and singer, one of the geniuses of the Harlem Renaissance period.  The revue "reviews" no fewer than 31 of his gems, mostly comic, a few deeply touching.  The show has roots as a 1978 cabaret (designed to transport the audience back to the uptown and downtown venues that Waller haunted), and then got moved behind a proscenium when it went to Broadway.  That hybrid heritage gives the show some flexibility to move either way; this production, while mounted on the Atlas' stage, emphasizes the cabaret setting, inviting audience volunteers to park themselves at the tables onstage (like the "students" in Spring Awakening).

Indeed, before the show even starts, one marvels at the cabaret-style set (courtesy of Elizabeth Jenkins McFadden) - or is it the lighting (designed by Andrew F. Griffin)?  It's hard to say where one ends and the other begins, because behind the tables and the on-stage band and some hanging racks of liquor bottles, arranged to look almost like notes spread out on a clef, is a huge scrim that is lit in striking and (as the show progresses) changing colors.  The lighting then becomes almost a character in this production, commenting on and highlighting the proceedings in an unusually intense way.  For instance, in THE VIPER'S DRAG, an ode to the effects of marijuana, Daryl A. Spiers stands bare-chested atop the bar, silhouetted against a poison-green wash while smoke plays around him.  The lighting, at least that aspect of it, is part of the set.

And once the proceedings get going, the two male and three female performers (Speirs, Iyona Blake, Nova Y. Payton, Lauren Du Pree, and Cliff Walker), plus a quartet fronted by Darius Smith, just keep kicking the show through the uprights.  Each one's "character" is named for the member of the original cast who premiered the role (on Broadway, not in cabaret).  Payton reprises Nell Carter, accurately reproducing the odd combination of brass and squeakiness that Carter trademarked.  I loved Du Pree's (Charlayne Woodard) dancing throughout, and her deliberately off-pitch bit as the Indiana ingénue in THE LADIES WHO SING WITH THE BAND.  Blake, following in Armelia McQueen's footsteps, has the red hot mama routine down pat.  Walker takes on Ken Page's role, and, while few can impersonate Waller himself as Page did, walks effortlessly through the Waller lines when called upon to repeat them, including the signature line: "One never knows, do one?"  Properly delivered, that gives you the essence of Waller, jumping bathetically from pseudo-British affectation to irregular-verb-sparse Ebonics in the space of five words.

There's a cultural statement there, obviously, a statement underlined by some of the songs in the show, most notably BLACK AND BLUE: "I'm white inside,/ But that don't help my case. / 'Cause I can't hide / What is on my face."  Waller celebrated blackness, to be sure, but simultaneously partly internalizEd White pretensions.  In an era when he had to enter some of the places he played by a side door, it would have been inhuman to resist completely the allure of white privilege.  It's all on view in his song LOUNGIN' AT THE WALDORF, which contrasts the kind of freedom and looseness he could enjoy performing in Harlem with the stiffer, whiter milieu of the Waldorf Astoria, for which he had a certain ambivalence.  As the lyric critically puts it: "They like jazz, but in small doses."  Nonetheless: "Ain't it swell doin' swell with the swells in the swellest hotel of them all?"  You don't need to be spot-on impersonating Waller to get that ambivalence across.  One of the strengths of the show (assembled by Murray Horwitz and Richard Maltby, Jr.) is that it doesn't whitewash (if I may use that word here) this part of Waller's legacy.

Or any other part of Waller's legacy.  It's all here: the flirtatiousness (HONEYSUCKLE ROSE), the exuberance (THE JOINT IS JUMPIN'), the rub-your-nose-in-it celebration of debauchery ('T AIN'T NOBODY'S BUSINESS IF I DO), the celebration of its opposite, domesticity (TWO SLEEPY PEOPLE, KEEPIN' OUT OF MISCHIEF NOW), the romantic side (SQUEEZE ME, I CAN'T GIVE YOU ANYTHING BUT LOVE), and the downright comic abusiveness - with again the racial subtext (FAT AND GREASY, YOUR FEET'S TOO BIG).  And even if you don't know Waller or this show, you know these great songs.  No wonder this revue was a hit; no wonder it keeps being revived.

Michael Bobbitt's direction and choreography are also superb (I warned you this was going to get repetitious).  Just to make sure I wasn't crazy or biased in reaching this conclusion, I visited YouTube after the show and checked out pieces of several other revivals of Ain't Misbehavin' and my conclusion stands: What Bobbitt does here in moving his cast around and telling them how to inflect their line deliveries is imaginative, original and powerful.

Oh, wait, I do have one quibble: the acoustics for that part of the audience sitting on the stage could use a lot of improvement.  (I volunteered to do so for the first half.)  But I must report that as soon as I went back to the auditorium seats, Denise Rose's sound design was crystalline.  And I sit through a lot of musicals you can't say that about.  So I'm still going with flawless.

In short, while I wouldn't recommend that you sit on the stage, I certainly would recommend that you get near the stage: make a point of getting to the Atlas and taking in this show, here for the next two weeks.  A must-see.

Ain't Misbehavin', Music by Thomas "Fats" Waller, by Murray Horwitz and Richard Maltby, Jr., Directed by Michael J. Bobbit.  Through June 19 at Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H Street Northeast, Washington, DC 20002.  Tickets $15-$40; (202) 399-7993 x2,  http://savoyards.org/ .  Suitable for all ages.