All aboard, lovers of Art Deco and great Broadway musicals! David Rockwell’s magnificent metallic deco drop for On the Twentieth Century is, itself, worth the price of admission for this all-awards-winnable musical revival. But there’s also the dynamite performance of the very blonde Kristin Chenoweth as the Major Hollywood Star, Lily Garland, being wooed and tricked back to the Great White Way by her former lover, Broadway producer, and all-`round Svengali, the currently bankrupt and out of ideas Oscar Jaffee.
Oscar has no script, no credit, and no backers, but everyone on the Art Deco Twentieth Century seems to have a play ready for him to read. Initially, Oscar also has no concept, but he soon collides with a millionaire religious nutcase, Letitia Peabody Primrose, wonderfully activated by Mary Louise Wilson, who can do handsprings with Olympic champions. Primrose—who sits on a pharmaceutical fortune—has been slapping REPENT Stickers all over the famed SuperTrain from LA to NYC, as well as on its celebrity passengers. But she has an open checkbook for Oscar if he will produce a religiously oriented Broadway show, starring Lily Garland. How about “Mary Magdalene” for a Broadway comeback after a Hollywood Oscar?
The hilarious book and the even more hysterical songs are among the best that the famed team of Comden & Green ever generated for Broadway. The jazzy score is also one of Cy Coleman’s most fabulous! But designer David Rockwell has given Broadway audiences an Art Deco masterpiece in recreating the super-streamlined Twentieth Century Limited onstage, both its sleek exterior and its elegant interiors. Not only that: Rockwell has constructed a steel-and-glass Chicago Station that would compare with any great European railway station—even those designed by Gustav Eiffel, who invented that famous tower.
Once again, William Ivey Long has created a riot of colorful costumes—quintessentially Art Deco—except for those in that fantastic Franco-Prussian War choreography of Warren Carlyle.
The ingenious Scott Ellis has encouraged all his actor/singer/dancers to overact in the grand manner. What’s even more amazing about Ellis’s work with his amazing cast is that the super-charged James Moye—who was almost an Oscar-winning Oscar—is not the male lead. Moye is the understudy for Peter Gallagher, but he looks and sounds like this is his role! (Usually Moye plays Max Jacobs, Oscar’s former office boy, now also a major producer. Ben Crawford proves a flamboyant replacement.) Mamie Parris is listed as Understudy for Kristin Chenoweth’s over-the-top Lily Garland. If she is as good as James Moye’s Oscar Jaffee & Ben Crawford’s Max Jacobs, she must be terrific. I’d love to see her as Lily, but I love this maniacal period production so much that I’d like to see it again and again, no matter who is the Ivey Long, Deco-decorated Garland.
