Fair warning for Titanic fans: Don’t go to Anything Can Happen in the Theater: The Musical World of Maury Yeston expecting a boatload of songs from the 1997 Tony-winning Best Musical. There’s only one—the all-too-short “Godspeed Titanic”—and you’ll have to wait until after the bows to hear it. But my goodness, even sung by an ensemble of just five and backed by a single piano in the postage-stamp-size York Theatre—as opposed to dozens of actors and orchestra members at the Lunt-Fontanne (or on the original cast recording)—is it ever gorgeous.
You might have that reaction several times throughout the charming Yeston-themed revue, conceived and directed by Forbidden Broadway mastermind Gerard Alessandrini. How had I forgotten about the lilting “Home,” from Yeston’s Phantom (aka “the other Phantom”): “I’m home, where music fills the air/ And I’m home, where a thousand lovers cry/ Swoon and sigh.” And why had I never noticed the soaring waltz accompaniment in the Baron’s booming “Love Can’t Happen” in Grand Hotel (sung here by Benjamin Eakeley)? Credit the terrific musical director/pianist Greg Jarrett, who’s on stage for this entire 75-minute intermission-free production.
Die-hard Grand Hotel and Nine fans will be happy to hear multiple songs from both of those musicals. Anything Can Happen is very Nine-heavy; Alessandrini even adds in the kicky “Cinema Italiano,” one of the three new numbers written for the 2009 Rob Marshall–directed movie of Nine, and Mamie Parris has a total ball with it. Parris also gets to climb on a piano and purr the seductive “Call From the Vatican,” and later break hearts with the tearful “Unusual Way.”
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★ review here.]
And there are four—count ’em, four!—songs from Yeston’s Pentateuch sendup In the Beginning (if you know that one, more power to you!): the father-son weepie “New Words,” now a cabaret-solo album staple; the exodus-ensemble dance number “Feet”; the buddy ballad “You’re There Too”; and “No Women in the Bible,” a comic duet for Parris and Alex Getlin: “There’s no women in the Bible/ You won’t find nary a one/ There’s no women in the Bible/ Just the mother or the sister of a brother or son.”
Shoehorned (often haphazardly) between all the made-for-the-stage tunes are trunk songs that were well worth the dig: the countryish “Danglin’,” delivered with a lovely melancholy lilt by Getlin (“Feeling low/ Feeling blue/ I am still in love with you/ And I don’t know what to do/ You left me danglin’”); the blues-tinged “Mississippi Moon”; and the toe-tapping “I Don’t Wanna Rock and Roll,” a lyrical rhyming marvel packed with classical in-jokes (“I don’t like the disco beat no more/ That music doesn’t take me home!/ But Boccherini, Sammartini, Paganini, and Rossini/ Drive me higher than the ‘Pini di Rome’”). For some reason, that genius ditty, which rhymes “crazy” with “Pergolesi,” is sandwiched between two numbers from Nine. And I’m still trying to puzzle out “Salt n’ Pepper,” a double-entendre-filled, kitchen-themed torch song that fell like a temperamental soufflé.
But another song from Nine would probably be pushing it.
Anything Can Happen in the Theater: The Musical World of Maury Yeston opened Dec. 5, 2019, and runs through Dec. 29 at the York Theatre at Saint Peter’s. Tickets and information: yorktheatre.org
