The revival of The Decline and Fall of the Entire World as Seen Through the Eyes of Cole Porter arrives, at the York, almost as a rebuke to contemporary musicals. Put together by Ben Bagley—about whom much more later—the 1965 revue includes as a result of impetuous design mostly lesser-known songs by the saucy, sassy sophisticated Porter. If you’re longing to hear “Just One of Those Things” or “In the Still of the Night” or “Night and Day,” be advised this isn’t the ticket for you.
If, instead, you want to hear Porter material often overlooked in the many retrospectives over the decades since his 1964 demise, you need to be here. Were many of these inclusions to show up as if for the first time in 2019-20, they’d instantly qualify as the best number of the season. For a mere taste, consider “Wake Up and Dream” or “Let’s Fly Away” or “After You, Who?” or “Farming,” which boasts the sly phrase, “Way down upon the Soigné River.” (Would a lyricist even dare something along those lines in 2019?)
When Bagley programmed Decline and Fall—no need to give the entire title every time—he knew what Porter-iana fit the original 1965 cast—Kaye Ballard, Harold Lang, Carmen Alvarez, William Hickey, and Elmarie Wendel. Then, as the hit acquired replacements and tours (Tammy Grimes was one Porter-style performer who joined), he’d drop and add songs that suited the newcomers.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★ review here.]
Pamela Hunt—who picks up the direction where Bagley left off in this first look back at this “hot” revue—is a miracle worker following Bagley’s lead. She’s juggled the song list for the polished entertainers she’s cast: Lee Roy Reams, Danny Gardner, Lauren Molina and Diane Phelan. There are only four of them, not five, which means more for each to do and do well, under Trent Kidd’s choreography.
Highpoints for each of them: Reams’ “I’m a Gigolo” and Sophie Tucker impersonation; Gardner’s flashy tapping whenever he’s asked to do so (especially dancing with a music stand in a Fred Astaire homage); Molina’s “Tale of the Oyster” and “Make It Another Old-Fashioned Please,” Phelan’s “I Happen to Like New York.” Maybe it’s unfair to focus on the foregoing numbers, as the four keep up the sleek work pretty much throughout.
There is the occasional lapse. Phelan is handed “When I Was a Little Cuckoo” from the 1941 Seven Lively Arts, and that’s a mistake. The ditty was written for Beatrice Lillie and perhaps could be brought off by her alone. The Reams-Gardner go at “Well, Did You Evah?” from DuBarry Was a Lady (1939) falls flat, surprisingly. (The definitive version is the Bing Crosby-Frank Sinatra duet in the 1958 High Society.) Allowing Molina to interpret “Down in the Depths (on the Ninetieth Floor)” as a display of histrionics strains patience. (Bagley had Ballard place a shawl over her shoulders and impersonate cabaret diseuse Mabel Mercer. Clever then but likely arcane now.)
Convivial, sly Reams narrates this Decline and Fall—Porter may very well have foreseen the musical comedy’s decline and fall in the 21st century—and Hunt is smart to maintain as much of Bagley’s waggish prose as she has. Porter was a master of innuendo. He liked nothing better than to épater le bourgeois in his New-York-City-and-Paris-by-way-of-Peru-Indiana-and-Yale manner. It’s an inclination Bagley shared with his idol and undoubtedly picked up from him.
In Porter’s “But in the Morning, No” (introduced by Bert Lahr and Ethel Merman), the question “Do you fill an inside straight?” is posed. Bagley’s script contains comments such as Irene Bordoni having “black hair and bangs” and Joan Crawford “working at Warner’s by day and Fox at night.” That brand of abundant Bagley wisecracking always enlivened the liner notes he supplied for his Painted Smiles label and its beloved “Revisited” series.
The two-act revue is often enhanced by Eric Svejcar’s music direction (he might occasionally approach the piano with less athleticism), James Morgan’s spare set design, and, particularly, Jamie Goodwin’s projection design. Goodwin fills in much theater and society history on the upstage screen. For much of the time a photograph of Porter relaxing on a divan in expensive casual clothes (although likely in at least some pain from his 1937 riding accident) prevails. Among other amusing memories of the period is a shot of Elsa Maxwell, only one of the myriad celebrities memorialized in Porter song.
The only thing missing from Decline and Fall—aside from a few knock-out verses inexplicably dropped from “At Long Last Love”—is the passion that distinguishes so much of his tunesmithing. That passion roars through his ballads like an untamed sea. It calls attention to a longing carefully not in evidence when, on opening nights, he’d stroll to his seat with solid gold cigarette case in hand. He saved that intense emotion for many of his most famous melodic outcries. In these circumstances, they’re for another time. Right now, just hop on for the ridin’-high fun.
The Decline and Fall of the Entire World as Seen Through the Eyes of Cole Porter opened October 13, 2019, at The York Theatre and runs through October 20. Tickets and information: yorktheatre.org
