ed by a full orchestra, the way they were produced back in the day. Broadway orchestras have been shrinking consistently for the past couple of decades so that it’s a rarity to hear ensembles of 28, 30, or more nowadays. But Encores! regularly uses full-sized orchestras for its concerts: The Most Happy Fella had 38 musicians and Cabin had 31. (Irma La Douce in May 2014 had just 10 instruments, but that was dictated by the nature of the show: the musical ensemble represented a café house band rather than a theater orchestra. See my Irma report on 20 May 2014.) Like the cast, the musicians are all Broadway pros and many have been playing the Encores! concerts for a while. (They, too, only get a few rehearsals for each production, so they need to draw on all their skills and experience to hit their marks and pick up their cues, so to speak.) Under the direction of Encores! musical director Rob Berman, the Cabin orchestra made Tunick’s arrangements of the Latouche-Duke score swell right from the overture. (Overtures apparently have become almost passé—you don’t hear them much anymore—but I like them. Not only does a musical’s overture give you a preview of what’s to come, musically speaking, but it sets the tone for the show before the curtain—another bygone theater element—goes up. It also signals the start of the performance, the moment the real world morphs into the stage world, in a way that nothing else does—like the blinking lights in the lobby that tells us to go on into the auditorium.)
There’s a trade-off, of course. The large orchestra is placed on the stage rather than in a pit, reducing the playing area the director and choreographer can use for the play’s action. It also reduces the flexibility of the stage for the set design, which tends more to the practical than the pictorial at Encores! productions. In Cabin, Anna Louizos created the environment with carefully selected pieces of furniture—Little Joe’s bed, the bar at John Henry’s, a bench in the Jackson’s back yard—and a projected backdrop, painted in a naïve, folk-art style, that helped set the scenes. It was functional and allowed the maximum use of the stage space remaining after the orchestra platform upstage had been installed. (Hand props are kept to a minimum, mostly because actors carrying scripts can’t manipulate objects very well.)
Karen Perry’s costumes were simple, too, for the most part; only the Head Man and the Lord’s General had what you’d call flashy attire. (The General was in a white outfit that looked like a cross between a naval uniform with epaulets and a silver sash, and an Elvis jump suit; the Head Man, wearing the coolest costume on the stage—the Devil, it seems, doesn’t only get the best lines, he gets the best duds—wore red—what else?—trousers and a red sequined jacket that sparkled in the stage lights.) The women’s dresses came in all colors and the skirts swirled out when the actors danced like Marilyn Monroe’s in the famous Seven Year Itch photo. The men’s outfits varied, but were generally less colorful—though the trousers came close to zoot suit pants. The whole look was a kind of romanticized ’40s, like a Hollywood movie set in that era, but made in the ’50s or ’60s.
In the press, the response to the Encores! Cabin in the Sky was pretty even. The Daily News’s Dziemianowicz, calling the show “a tuneful curiosity and a hit-and-miss labor of love,” characterized it this way: “Songs by Vernon Duke and John Latouche are mostly ear-ticklers, wrapped in newly restored arrangements that lend a juicy big-band bounce. Lynn Root’s book is an odd mix of faith, fable and fantasy.” In amNew York, Matt Windman, pronouncing the production not “so much a revival as it is a full-scale resuscitation,” described the plot as a “combination of romance, marital drama and religious trial.” With Santiago-Hudson’s “focused direction” and Berman’s “characteristically excellent music direction,” Windman concluded that Cabin was “an admirable production of a dated, diffuse and difficult work.” Elisabeth Vincentelli of the New York Post asserted that with