Talent, like fireworks, is now bursting from the Feinstein’s/54 Below stage. The astonishment is thanks to Twohander, in which Sherie Rene Scott and Norbert Leo Butz reassess their long-standing professional and sort-of-romantic, on-and-off relationship as they deliver (and sometimes read from) a script written by Scott .
Scott sees it as a chance for them to work together after other projects they’ve shared, most notably The Last Five Years, with its Jason Robert Brown score, and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, with its David Yazbek score.
Racing onto the stage as if propelled by hurricane-force winds, Scott and Butz immediately give a wowee dollop of who they are when they’re strictly themselves and not tailoring their personalities to characters. Nothing wrong with that, of course.
Scott, tall and as stunning as ever at 52 (announced in The New York Times last week), spends much of her time standing still but hardly holding back. She knows she has only to flash her eyes and fling her voice to have maximum effect. She is so sure of her appeal that she even has pockets in her sequined mini-dress, where she can place her hands much of the hotsy-totsy time. That ease alone is testament to her keen presence.
Butz takes the opposite approach. With the exception of the occasional ballad he croons, he performs with hyperkinetic energy. His head is weaving, his arms are embracing the room, he’s beautifully lurching here and there. It may be that he’s never had the opportunity to sing with such bravura or been able to display his intuitive way with a lyric. Also 52 (the Times again), Butz plays the guitar as if he’s a third of his age and forming a rock band.
The two sing together much of their hour or so, proving that composers, lyricists and bookwriters should be running up shows for them to appear a deux on the legit stage. Or is this Twohander Scott’s idea of the tryout for a project worthy of a theater, much as her Everyday Rapture and Whorl Inside a Loop, co-written with Dick Scanlan (the snazzy Twohander director), were just that?
If so, the current run should offer the chance to strengthen what’s already much of the way there. Scott intends Twohander not merely to be a chance for old pals to reprise some of the songs they performed in The Last Five Years and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels as well as Rent, the click Jonathan Larsen tuner where they met. (That’s when she seemed more taken with him than he with her). She pictures the reunion as an opportunity to dive into the murky waters of show-biz friendships—and, in a wider sense, to look at nutty friendship parabolas anywhere.
(She’s on to something there, as almost any New Yorker, who’s ever had friends, fallen out with them before reconciling, ad infinitum, will swear is so.)
As for the Sherie-Norbert alliance, she and he fell for each other’s performing abilities some 30 years back. It’s more than hinted that they fell for their extracurricular abilities offstage as well—when they were both married. Timing was understandably not good on a few accounts. Things got so bad with Butz’s erratic onstage Dirty Rotten Scoundrels timing (drinking, part of the problem) that when the run ended, Scott and Butz didn’t talk to each other for several years. (In the Times interview, Scott says that while what’s revealed in the play isn’t all true, it’s all true.)
Scott and Butz harmonize in solos and duets, under Todd Almond’s music direction and occasional background vocalizing—on “La Vie Boheme” and “One Song Glory” from Rent,“ “If I Didn’t Believe in You” and “The Next Ten Minutes” from The Last Five Years, “Nothing is Too Wonderful to Be True” from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and other songs they haven’t sung together or separately in musicals. Yet as they do, the tell-all tale Scott’s revving about the two of them doesn’t maintain the desired focus.
That’s what needs careful honing if the real result here is not a cabaret gig but a theater property. If “harmonizing” in Twohander isn’t simply a description of how well Scott and Butz fit vocally but is also a metaphor for successful friendship—with the implication that “disharmony” represents troubled friendship—there’s the area Scott needs to remember when her purpose gets partially blurred just past the halfway mark.
Twohander ends with Scott and Butz singing George Michael’s “Freedom” with the lyric, “I don’t belong to you, and you don’t belong to me.” It’s a clever choice, suggesting that independence is a key friendship element, with sharing implied. It also serves as a reminder that Scott’s and Butz’s talents don’t belong to the patrons, but they are so generously shared from start to finish that it sure feels that way.
Twohander opened July 9, 2019, at Feinstein’s/54 Below and runs through July 28. Tickets and information: 54below.com
