Review: DAMN YANKEES at Arena Stage Starring Rob McClure, Ana Villafañe & Jordan Donica

Washington, D.C. has its very own perfectly awful last place home team, so it's inexplicable why the tweakers of Damn Yankees — originally about a Washington Senators fan who causes the Bronx Bombers to lose the pennant—revised the script to make the Charm City Os the losers who win said flag. Adapters Doug Wright (b. Dallas, TX) and Will Power (b. Oakland, CA maybe?) are definitely not from around here, and Mr. Abbott and DC native Douglass Wallopp, who wrote the original 1955 book, are no longer with us. League, schmeague: it would've been fun to see Screech in a decal of sequins on the back of Lola's game day leggings. Go Nats.

A stupendous cast of gamers, Sergio Trujillo's choreography which bats a thousand, and Adler and Ross' Tony-winning score field the first inning of Arena Stage's 75th season with a number of entertaining homers. The winning streak that the New York Yankees enjoyed in the 1950s made more than one ball fan curse them. Joe, the hero of Damn Yankees, wants to defeat them so badly that he attracts the devilish Applegate (Rob McClure) who makes him an offer he can't refuse, even though it means he has to leave his beloved wife, Meg, (Bryonha Marie). Marie, lyrically sings beautiful duets straight down the middle with both her Joes, Quentin Earl Darrington as the ball fan of a certain age and Jordan Donica as the 5-tool ballplayer he becomes after his Faustian bargain. But Donica easily switch hits musical styles from ballads to whatever Lola wants.

Ana Villafañe, as Lola, begins as Applegate's minion, a cheese-throwing seductress; by the bottom of the ninth, Lola has become a hall of famer. But when she's first called into the game, the audience has just gotten its breath from Trujillo's show-stopping staging of “Shoeless Joe from Hannibal Mo,” a hit parade for the dancing ensemble with an assist from Alysha Umphress (Gloria Thorpe, the lady scribe who follows the Birds), when Lola stops it again with a little brains and a lot of talent. And then Villafañe catches her breath and gets what she came for. She has two more at bats in Act II and four bags in her stats when she shuts the door; this performance defines triple threat. Linda Cho hits Lola's costumes out of the park. Cho gives her mini-dresses, golden gowns, jumpsuits, evening coats, sequins and velvets and jewels. Everyone else in the show looks great, but Cho's designs for Lola are in a league of their own.

Rob McClure's Applegate has a no-hitter going until his late inning bobble of his only solo number. For most of Damn Yankees, he charms and smarms and pushes Joe and Lola around with the energetic cynicism of all narcissistic devils (sound like anyone you know?). But his 11 o'clock vaudeville turn, “Bring Back the Good Old Days,” requires neither selling nor hype, only underplaying; when you don't swing at every pitch, the audience comes to you. Maybe McClure and Director Trujillo are too young to appreciate this old theatrical ploy, throwing it away. But this is the only cross-up in the whole production (aside from the now apparently obligatory bush league practice of drowning out many of the singers' outstanding work with overamplification). Robert Brill's fine set design stays out of the way—the ensemble's dancin' here!

A silently eloquent moment occurs late in Act II of this Damn Yankees when Donica has taken over the singing of the National Anthem before the game that will damn the Yankees (and fine musician that he is, Donica sings it as written with his glorious voice and none of the vocal mannerisms so prevalent in today's ballparks). While he sings, an African-American man in a baseball uni that reads “KC” stands off to one side. Satchel Paige and Buck O'Neil and Mr. Cub all signed with the Kansas City Monarchs, the great Negro League team that often played Griffith Stadium when the Senators were on the road. Elston Howard, damn Yankee, began with KC; in 1945, the Monarchs' shortstop was Jackie Robinson. Silently eloquent; the more you know.

So when Damn Yankees concludes its two hour and fifteen minute game at the Fich, your luck really will be batting zero because there's no more Trujillo choreography to look forward to; then you really do gotta have heart.