Review: BROADWAY BOUND Belongs at 54 Below

It’s hard to believe that BROADWAY BOUND: THE MUSICALS THAT NEVER CAME TO BROADWAY is up to its seventh installment but the popular series at 54 Below did, indeed, just play its seventh night in the Midtown Manhattan cabaret club.  On Tuesday, September 10th, hosts, historians, and impresarios Robert W. Schneider and Charles Kirsch took their places on their cabaret stools upstage left and launched into another program of appreciating Broadway that never played Broadway.  These two gentlemen for whom the theater is more than a diet, more than a career, more than a lifestyle, it is air itself, gathered around them yet another rogue’s gallery of the gifted and beguiling, and the songs that only a few of us know, but that many should have.  It was a splendid night of entertainment, and also of trivia and facts from behind the velvet curtain.

For their seventh installment of their defunct musicals series, Misters Kirsch and Schneider (and the ever-essential Michael Lavine musical directing from behind the piano) ran the gamut from discussing plays based on literature (Freaky Friday) to musicals based on plays (Bus Stop), from musicals based on legend (Gypsy) to projects based on movies (The Forty Year Old Virgin), with even some original material like Ron Miller’s Clothespins and Dreams, represented by a lovely tune performed by Mr. Miller’s own daughter, Lisa Dawn.  For each entry, there were tales both humorous and touching (like the problems that plagued the creepy Lolita, My Love or learning that Amy Spanger met her husband while doing Robin and The Seven Hoods), and between the two emcees and their guests, it was a musical evening of hilarity and humanity, the sort of night one comes to expect at 54 Below, where shows like this aren’t just the norm, they are de rigueur.  

Let us not be coy about it:  when Broadway musicals don’t make it to Broadway, it can be for any reason, from running out of money to running out of interest, and sometimes one of the reasons is a lack of quality material.  It is not for this writer and musical theater devotee to say which of the songs presented were flying under the viability radar - never having written or produced a Broadway musical, I am ill-equipped to judge, though each audience member probably had their own opinions.  I will say that performing a song out of the context of its source material is tricky, at best, and, at its worst, impossible.  Messrs Schneider and Kirsch used their well-practiced skill at this job to present the best possible setups for their artists, while the musical storytellers did their best to provide context and emotional gravitas, especially when it came to the ballads (like LaDonna Burns playing every bit of emotion in “I’ve Never Been A Woman Before”) and the comedy (like Jim Walton slaying with his movie star impressions during “Lolita”).  With each individual artist showcasing that which makes them individual, these musical numbers ranged from satisfying (Steve Ross singing “You There In The Back Row”) to moving (Robert Cuccioli singing “Like Any Man” from The Hunchback of Notre Dame), sometimes with the performers saying a few words before they sang, and others with the actors hitting their mark, doing their thing, and getting off the stage.  It was a mixed bag, very relaxed, personal, professional, and well-executed, which, after six other productions, is to be expected.  

Particular highlights of the night were “So Much In Common” from No Way To Treat A Lady, introduced by creator Douglas J. Cohen and played for all its comedy worth by Klea Blackhurst, Michael Thomas Holmes, and last-minute replacement Emily Ricalde (a major score for the production), a hi-ho-larious “Mama’s Talkin’ Soft” by Amy Jo Jackson and real-life brother Aaron Jackson, and Joe Iconis recounting the story of writing a pitch song for a proposed musical version of a movie he was not allowed to say the name of, right before Jeremy Morse hit it out of the park with the number “Andy’s Song.”  Christine Pedi and Michael Lavine embodied Annabel Andrews and Ape Face with their duet, Bianca Marroquin was fiery as ever with her number from a telenovela-inspired musical, while Karen Mason and Christiane Noll proved, once more, why they are considered the best in the business with touching performances of musical monologues.  But it has to be said that the thrill of the night was getting to see Eve Plumb live.  The iconic television actress is a right proper stage actor and musical theater performer, and after her Act One finale from Annie 2: Miss Hannigan’s Revenge, Rob Schneider remarked that we need more Eve Plumb on stage, and the gentleman is absolutely correct.  More Plumb, please.  To close out the evening, the crowd was treated to a buoyant number from the musical Minsky’s performed by Mary Callanan, Shannon Haddock, Neal Mayer, Michael McCoy and Stacey Scotte that was a joyful way for Charles and Rob to close out yet another episode of their on stage serial.  It is just such nights as this one, as all of the programs that Lavine, Schneider, and Kirsch create, that make going to 54 Below an important part of our New York nightlife.  It’s hard to think of another club that is regularly presenting this type of work at such a high vibration, and all of the musical theater mavens who love the shows, the hits, the flops, the stalled productions and the future stagings will always turn up to see this kind of content.  Thank goodness it exists for the audiences, but also for the artists:  they deserve to do this work and we deserve to see it.

Find great shows to see on the 54 Below website HERE.

Photos by Stephen Mosher

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