It’s the Muny. The full-strength Muny. The only thing missing was the pre-show dinners at the Culver Pavilion, a small price to pay for a surprisingly pleasant weather-wise evening of The Real Thing. Yes, they suggest masks. But it was obvious in the way Mike Isaacson, artistic director and executive producer was greeted for his traditional curtain speech that the audience was more than ready to rock and roll.
That’s fortunate, since the opener for this shortened season is Smokey Joe’s Cafe, the revue of songs from the prolific team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. They produced the soundtrack for many of our lives, tunes coming from jukeboxes and car radios stretching from the bobby sox years through to the acid-groovy ones.
When faced with shows like this, one always wonders is anyone too young to have heard this music even interested in such stuff? Goodness knows the traditional teenaged eye-roll is always a threat. And yet...and yet....
I can recall being exposed to my mother's Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman sounds and thinking that they sure sounded dated – but were pretty pleasant to listen to. I suspect that response is what led me into discovering jazz by my sophomore year in high school, when absolutely no one else listened to it, or at least admitted same. And I was thrilled this past year to discover that in the small town/rural county where I grew up, some kids have become excited by jazz band classes. So there's hope for the generations to come. In the meanwhile, nostalgia reigns in Forest Park.
Revues generally don’t have much if any story line, and that’s true here. It distracts not at all from what we see and hear. The audience is greeted by a set that takes us back to that time, with plenty of images from the glory years of Gaslight Square. After all, one of the most visible things there was a line of Greek columns marking the sidewalk outside Smokey Joe’s Grecian Terrace. The St. Louis visuals continue – a shopping bag clearly marked with the logo of Stix, Baer & Fuller literally drew gasps from some of the audience. The orchestra, smaller in size for this music, has been moved out of the pit, upstage and on an upper level. A tip of the Cardinals cap to scenic designer Edward E. Haynes, Jr., for this fun.
There’s a wide range of great songs, many of which will be familiar to even the casual listener. “Stand by Me” gets a great treatment from Charl Brown. “Searchin’”, another classic, is in good hands with Mykal Kilgore. Yes, of course there’s “Yakety Yak” and “Charlie Brown”, both universally guaranteed to produce a smile on the listener. Those of a certain age will find themselves thrown back into things like dancing in a friend’s basement to this music.
It’s sometimes easy to forget that Leiber and Stoller also wrote many of the early Elvis Presley hits. Interestingly, one of the big Elvis hits was a cover. “Hound Dog” was originally recorded by Big Mamma Thornton in 1952, and Tiffany Mann’s version of it is an absolute winner, clearly in that blues-shouting style. (You can hear it here, although that sure looks more like Josephine Baker in the photo showing in the video.) Forget that kid from Tupelo, here’s how you talk about a cheating man. Brown and Dee Roscioli, another belter, team up for a great “Love Me/Don’t”. Christopher Sams (who’s quite the hoofer) and Nasia Thomas cover “Spanish Harlem”, whose very sound sent me back to when I made my single (and very under-age) visit to a roadhouse called The Artesian.
Marcia Milgrom Dodge’s splendid production outclasses any I’ve seen of this show. It’s a totally swinging evening and a simply sparkling start to the season.
Smokey Joe’s Cafe
through August 1
The Muny
1 Theatre Drive
Forest Park
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