Review: THE NANCE Kills at Elmwood Playhouse

As the lights came up on The Nance, I was instantly struck – dumbstruck even – by two intertwined visions: a nattily-attired gent (who looked remarkably like Nathan Lane) seated solo at a table in front of what passes for nostalgia art – a rendering of Horn & Hardart’s Automat, the self-serve cafeteria with its iconic honeycomb wall of coin-operated compartments serving up your dish of choice. Flanking the gent with their backs to us are mysteriously trenchcoat-cloaked figures skulking about.

With that indelible, deliciously noirish opening – beautifully staged by skillful director Alan Demovsky – Douglas Carter Beane’s masterly crafted, ebullient yet melancholy homage to the last gasp of vaudeville, “The Nance,” makes its impactful presence known in short order. It is at Elmwood Playhouse in Nyack, N.Y., through June 7 (elmwoodplayhouse.com). 

In its own way, this love-lost story of an effeminate stock male character (a “Nancy”) in “the show business” of the 1930s has epic ambitions – it’s a colorful, nimble tapestry textured with high-stakes pathos alternating with low humor, weaving a spell of superior and highly original Stage Entertainment. 

There’s a documentary sensibility about it too: scenes of backstage action and of the Nance, Chauncey Miles (Chad Paul Hudson), shacking up with newfound lover Ned (Aaron Newcome), are intercut with studiously faithful stagings of classic vaudeville sketches that the cast and Mr. Demovsky pull off with terrific timing, energy and relish. It’s like getting two shows for the price of one. 

On opening night, the loopy puns and bon mots repeatedly drew continual waves of guffaws from the delighted audience, with some of the reaction slightly delayed as the witty if goofy wordplay  – just about all of it scatological – sunk in. (“Do you have any nuts?” the lady asks the man. “Uh, no,” he says. “Do you have any dates?” she then inquires. “If I had nuts,” he replies, “I’d have dates.”) Whaaat?! The double entendres fly fast and furious and hilarious. 

Audience members of a certain age will hark back decades as they relive memorable routines like “Niagara Falls (Slowly I Turned),” made famous on screen by comedy duo Abbot and Costello, as well as quintessential bump-and-grind sketch “Meet Me Round the Corner in a Half an Hour.”  

The authenticity of the sketches extends to wonderfully clownish, gaudy (and naughty) costumes, continuous underscoring, a panoply of props and sonic effects, like the suggestive sliding whistle and rim shots, and a randy trio of the requisite ecsdysiasts (aka strippers) doing some hydraulic bump-and-grind animations. The threesome of Tiffany M. Card (Sylvie), Sam Shyder (Joan), and Candace Lynn Matthews (Carmen) more than hold their own in the sketches. They kick it into high gear with both movement and mirth. 

The thing about Chauncey, unlike other actors of the day also cast as Nances, is summed up by charmingly naive Ned, who, on first meeting Chauncey without realizing who he is, says of Chauncey, “I hear in real life he is a pansy, which is kind of like a Negro doing blackface.” Ned is a down-and-out gentle soul who’s left behind his family life to become Chauncey’s live-in lover and becomes part of the performances at the Irving Place Theater, a landmark vaudeville venue in downtown Manhattan.  

A key element of the production’s undaunted, driving pace is the turntable set that alternates between each successive scene. It’s a very smart stagecraft solution by Mr. Demovsky, who told me the device “gives you the opportunity of being able to stage many locales in an efficient manner. If you have several locations, such as an Automat, a Hell’s Kitchen apartment, the backstage and stage of a burlesque house, you can do all of that by just turning the ‘plate’ to reveal all of those without it taking long, which holds the attention of the audience in a more entertaining and cinematic way than if you had to take the time for stage hands to set all of that up while the audience sits in the dark.” 

As Chauncey, Chad Paul Hudson’s uncanny resemblance to Nathan Lane is undeniable. (That Douglas Carter Beane tailored this tragicomic piece for Mr. Lane is evident in the script’s frontispiece dedication (“For Nathan Lane”).

But let’s not lose sight of what immediately becomes obvious as the lights go up on “The Nance.” While Mr. Hudson shares Mr. Lane’s familiar facial expressiveness, from arched eyebrows to the pursed, sideways, wry smile – this actor’s formidable talent is his own, not a clone. It’s easy to effuse superlatives about his performance, so let’s simply call it perfect because it’s hard to imagine anyone doing it better.

Also outstanding are Aaron Newcome as empathetic Ned and Andrew Lionetti as top banana and theater manager Efram. Mr. Lionetti has to oscillate between all manner of vaudeville characters and bringing a sober professionalism to his oversight of theater operations and the eccentric castmates. He executes the multi-layered characterizations with total conviction and precision. 

As Ned, the strapping Mr. Newcome, physically equal to what the author describes as “a handsome, masculine young man,” wins Chauncey’s heart, after a fashion, as well as the audience’s. He impressively effects the persona and the speech of a simple man adrift and devoid of pretension, then pulls out of his hat a crowd-pleasing send-up of Broadway grand dames of the day Tallulah Bankhead and Gertrude Lawrence in all their high falutin’ pretension. 

Also in the cast are Liam Thomas as Cop/Stagehand and Janet Fenton as Rose.

Chauncey is a proud if not entirely happy gay man bursting at the seams to come out, which makes ever-vigilant Efram, putting aside his own homophobia, increasingly anxious and worried for Chauncey’s mental and physical well-being, as decency leagus demonize homosexuals and fascistic government authorities tag him and his kind for the trumped-up “crime” of “degenerate disorderly conduct.” 

Not unlike Broadway musical “Cabaret,” set in Nazi Germany, in “The Nance,” Mr. Beane heightens the banality of intolerance and paranoia by contrasting the lightness of spirit inside the theater with the darkness of oppression outside that is closing in around the performers.  

A century later, that homophobia still rears its addled head, as Mr. Demovsky alludes to in a Director’s Note in the program, describing why The Nance appealed to him: “Exploring the effect that such ignorance and prejudice has on the human psyche was a theme I felt needed to be retold, especially today when once again we are seeing these same challenges confronting the gay community.”

It’s not merely Chauncey facing an existential crisis, but the whole demimonde of burlesque – whose enduring icons include W.C. Fields and Gypsy Rose Lee – which is nothing less than the oxygen on which Chauncey and his confreres survive. As the end of their world draws near, they are hoping against hope to get a reprieve from the likes of New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. That belief proves to be a fanciful a conceit as the ribald blackouts that punctuate their performances.  

As officials move to clean up the city, the salacious content of burlesque is deemed too family-unfriendly. Chauncey, who’s struggled to find his way to top banana at more prestigious venues than the Irving Place Theater, now is being dealt one final indignity as his whole profession – his raison d’etre – is becoming obsolete before his very eyes. The metaphor of “lights out” as the end of something is made literal at the play’s ultimate blackout. 

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