A Marvelous Party! indeed

After the first half of A Marvelous Party!, I was ready to throw in the towel. This musical tribute to Noel Coward was coming across as so trivial and irrelevant, I found myself wondering why I’d taken Coward so seriously over the years, and even thought of him as a standard-bearer of urbane wit and stubborn decency in an often savage and indecent century.

But here they were: insignificant, mediocre songs like “London Pride” and “What Ho! Mrs. Brisket,” and here I was being asked to care about “Has Anybody Seen Our Ship,” with the utterly forgettable lines, “We’ve been on shore for a month or more/And when we see the captain/We shall get what for.” Surely the devisers of this tepid entertainment — David Ira Goldstein, Carl Danielsen, Mark Anders, and Patricia Wilcox — could have found better examples of Coward’s art than “She sailed away/Across the bay,/And we haven’t had a smell of her/Since New Year’s Day!” Perhaps the Noel Coward that I’d long admired was not to be found at American Stage.

And then Act Two started – and everything changed. First, Melissa Bayern sang a deeply moving rendition of “Mad About The Boy,” and any sentient human who’d ever been in love had to admit knowing the “odd diversity of/misery and joy” to which the song referred. Then Larry Alexander turned in a splendid version of “I’ve Been To A Marvelous Party,” which touched on Coward’s gayness with memories of how “young Bobby Carr did a stunt at the bar/With a lot of extraordinary men…/The grand duke was dancing a foxtrot with me/When suddenly Cyril cried ‘fiddle-dee-dee!’/And ripped off his trousers and jumped in the sea./I couldn’t have liked it more.” After a regress of a some minutes (the exceedingly unimportant “Why Do The Wrong People Travel?” and “Sail Away”), the ingenious “There Are Bad Times Just Around The Corner” followed, and we were back to the recognizable world of international crisis – the world, that is, in which we still live. Next, Matt McGee and Bayern delivered the beautiful love song “A Room With A View” and for the rest of the evening there was nothing but honest emotion or wonderfully witty wordplay, not to mention a hilarious parody of Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall In Love).” The shipwreck of Act One was (almost) forgotten. This was a marvelous party.

So should you invite yourself to it? Consider these details: there are four main singers — Lizzie Hagstedt is the fourth — and musical director Philip King mans one of the two pianos (Hagstedt’s occasionally on the other) and enters the action at unpredictable moments. Wearing period fashions designed by Mike and Kathy Buck, the main actors dance a little, clown a lot, and barely take on recognizable personalities.

Alexander, with perhaps the most spectacular singing voice, is the gay Don Juan, just past his prime but still devoted to a life of pleasure. Bayern is the romantic sophisticate, led by her heart into all sorts of difficult entanglements, and much more intellectual than the men she falls for. McGee is the crowd-pleaser, born to make us laugh, and Hagstedt is the dynamo, brimming with talent and enthusiasm and good intentions.

On Greg Bierce’s set — an amalgam of walkways, small stages, and an imposing staircase, backed by oversize travel posters from the ’20s and ’30s— these performers present us not only with songs but with aphorisms (“The world has treated me very well, but then I haven’t treated it so badly either”), confessions (“I’m a drudge about work, you know. And as a matter of fact, I absolutely loathe Champagne.”) and a snippet of a Coward play (South Sea Bubble). Director Steven Flaa does a tiptop job of keeping the action moving, and has even opted to put some spectators at tables onstage in order to emphasize the cabaret ambience. (I wonder whether the show would do better in a small cabaret space — Act One particularly seems out of place on a mainstage.)

One last caveat: this is not a comprehensive introduction to Noel Coward. Most of his best-known plays are missing, his contributions to the war effort of the ’40s are missing, and there’s little to remind us that the writer/composer/lyricist was also an actor of distinction. Mostly this is a grab-bag of songs, some of which are, as I’ve suggested, second-rate. If there are treasures here, there's also flotsam and jetsam.

Or as Coward himself put it: “Most of my gift horses seemed to have come with bad teeth.”

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