CDs: Roustabout
ALL SHOOK UP Sony BMG
The surviving jukebox musical from last season, All Shook Up is a cleverly assembled piece that a few critics even deemed superior to the foremost example of the genre, Mamma Mia! And while All Shook Up's reviews were mixed, it's possible to maintain that the show was unfairly shut out of the Tony nominations, with nods certainly owed to David Rockwell's sets and the show's discovery, Cheyenne Jackson, playing the mysterious stranger who transforms a square, midwestern town.
Featuring the songs of Elvis Presley and resetting the plot of Twelfth Night and other Shakespearean comedies in a single day in 1955, All Shook Up has been doing well but not spectacularly at the Palace Theatre's box office. But it's certain to have a life around the country and in Europe; it should go over well in places like London, where they've already had several popular Elvis-related musicals, and Germany, where they seem to love pop musicals.
The chief question about a cast recording of a show like All Shook Up is whether or not it comes across as more than a random collection of pre-existing pop hits. In this case, the answer is: almost. Those who've seen the show will, when listening to the CD, recall the characters who are singing and the outlines of the plot. For the uninitiated, the recording is likely to seem less theatrical and more of an Elvis collection. It qualifies as a well-performed assemblage of classic pop. But it must also be said that Elvis songs, even the ones that derive from movies, feel less theatrical than, say, the ABBA songs of Mamma Mia!
Jenn Gambatese is an appealing, vocally confident leading lady; Jackson is strong throughout; Sharon Wilkins scores with her emotional outburst in "There's Always Me"; and it's fun to hear Broadway belter Alix Korey in her brief opportunity with "Devil in Disguise." From top to bottom, this is a well-cast show, and all of the other six principals are equally effective.
Needless to say, the show's humor resides in the book, so it's absent on the CD. With just a few lines of dialogue here and there, there's only an occasional hint on the disc of how the songs fit the narrative. So the recording doesn't amount to much more than those songs, nicely arranged by Stephen Oremus and orchestrated by Oremus and Michael Gibson.
There's a helpful booklet essay by librettist Joe DiPietro and Emily King that explains the genesis of the show. A few tracks stand out, especially the octet first-act finale, ""Can't Help Falling in Love." But the All Shook Up cast album will probably appeal most to fans of this music. Inevitably, it's a good deal less interesting than last season's top cast albums, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Spelling Bee, and The Light in the Piazza.
BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY Sh-K-Boom
Evoking a certain strata of Manhattan life in the 1980s, Jay McInerney's novel Bright Lights, Big City offers a week in the life of a twenty-four-year-old writer adrift in the city. He takes drugs and parties. He pines after the wife/model who left him. He recalls the mother who died one year ago. He loses his job as fact checker at a New Yorker-type magazine. He self destructs, but gradually finds his way back.
McInerney's screenplay for the 1988 film version stuck close to the book, but the book's relative lack of plot along with the absence of the novel's narrative voice resulted in an unworkable film. But that didn't deter Paul Scott Goodman, the author of the book, music, and lyrics for the stage musical version of Bright Lights, Big City, produced in early 1999 at New York Theatre Workshop.
The show was widely regarded as a follow-up to Rent, another NYTW, Michael Greif-directed, through-sung rock musical about life in New York. Partly because it was viewed as a sequel to the 1996 smash, Bright Lights, Big City won a disappointing reception and closed after thirty-one performances.
The NYTW production's cast was headed by Patrick Wilson, in the enormous central role of Jamie, with Jerry Dixon, Kerry O'Malley, and Natascia Diaz in other leading roles. A serious miscalculation was having Goodman, guitar in hand, playing himself the character was called "Writer", introducing the show at the start and thereafter trailing the hero, narrating and commenting on the action.
The brief run and negative critical reception meant that Bright Lights closed unrecorded. But that has now been remedied by Sh-K-Boom. In one of the label's more ambitious projects, a reworked concert version at the Guggenheim with a strong cast has now resulted in an elaborate recording. The only cast holdovers from NYTW are the essential Wilson and, in the role of Jamie's mother, Ann Marie Milazzo, who also did the show's vocal arrangements.
Most of the songs on the seventy-seven-minute CD were in the NYTW production, but there has been reordering and revision, and the role of "Writer" has wisely been eliminated. Five musicians play a variety of instruments. The gifted cast includes Jesse L. Martin, Sherie Rene Scott, Christine Ebersole, Eden Espinosa, Celia Keenan-Bolger, and Gavin Creel; no less than Kelli O'Hara is in the chorus.
The best tracks are the title song; the mother's "Happy Birthday, Darling" and "Are You Still Holding My Hand?"; ex-wife Amanda's "To Model"; Jamie's first-act closer, "So Many Little Things"; and "Heart and Soul," for Jamie's mother, brother, and new love.
While it's nice that Bright Lights, Big City has now been preserved with such a strong cast, I still find it a strenuous musical, more exhausting than affecting. Perhaps those who favor rock musicals will find more to like in it, and fans of the show should be thrilled with this recording. But McInerney's novel still seems to resist dramatization, and this musical version continues to leave me cold.
