Review - The Best Is Yet To Come: The Music of Cy Coleman

With an uneventful 6pm coming and going on the evening of May 21st, I rested comfortably that night secure in the knowledge that any predictions of the arrival of Judgment Day were, at the very least, miscalculations. But the next evening, as I sat watching David Burnham, Sally Mayes, Howard McGillin, Billy Stritch, Lillias White and Rachel York perform eight-five minutes of songs composed by Broadway's heppist hepcat, Cy Coleman, you'd have a tough time convincing me I'd not been raptured into Heaven.

Devised and directed by one of his late-career lyricist collaborators, David Zippel, The Best Is Yet To Come, serves up 31 Coleman compositions - from pop standards like "Witchcraft" and "It Amazes Me" to Broadway showstoppers like "If My Friends Could See Me Now" and "It's Not Where You Start (It's Where You Finish)" to gems from unfinished or unproduced scores like the heart-tugging "It Started With A Dream" from Pamela's First Musical - in an intimate setting by Douglas W. Schmidt that resembles a supper club floor show. William Ivey Long clads the company in elegant swank and an eight-piece jazz ensemble, sitting behind classic-style big band stands, is led by pianist Stritch, who fashioned the sharp and clever arrangements that are colored with Don Sebesky's top-shelf orchestrations.

While Broadway fans shouldn't expect any On The 20th Century comic operatics, Wildcat twangs or a mini-recreation of Tommy Tune's tambourine-shaking Will Rogers Follies choreography, the centerpiece of the evening is an all-around magnificent blending of musical theatre excellence as Lillias White, after vamping the musicians with "Never Met A Man I Didn't Like," plops herself down to reprise her Tony-winning role as an aging hooker in The Life, lamenting, "(I'm Getting Too Old For) The Oldest Profession." White luxuriates in the dramatic depths provided by Coleman's tired blues matched with Ira Gasman's sardonic lyrics, bringing out pathos, humor and vocal thrills in a masterful display of character-driven song interpretation. Even if you saw her back then, you have to see her now.

The rest of the evening is nightclubbier, allowing White to exude more casual charm in numbers like Carolyn Leigh's comically provocative "Don't Ask A Lady" and celebratory "Little Me," which she duets with Stritch in a playful arrangement. Billy Stritch's hauntingly phrased performance of "It Amazes Me" is another extraordinary moment.

David Burnham's jazzy swagger infuses seductions like "I've Got Your Number" and "Witchcraft." While McGillin plays a comical seduction with "You Fascinate Me So," his big moment comes with a vocally soaring dramatic ballad, "I'd Give The World"; one of four selections from the unproduced Zippel/Coleman score for a show titled N*.

Sally Mayes, another outstanding musical theatre character actress, nails all the stinging bite of "Nobody Does It Like Me" and scorches with the torcher, "With Every Breath I Take." Rachel York and Billy Stritch's arrangement strike some gorgeous moods in "Come Summer," but her most memorable turn is a combination of the novelty number, "The Doodling Song," with a flirtatious interpretation of "Hey, Look Me Over."

Without narration or any dramatic thread, Zippel uses tissue-thin relationships between the lyrics and performances to seamlessly glide from one song to the next. And as the evening goes on, the consistently high quality of lyrics Coleman worked with - from the colorful street-wise vernacular of Carolyn Leigh and Dorothy Fields to the intricate wordplay of Zippel himself - becomes startling. But everything about this revue is sublimely first rate.

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