nown for their singing (LaChanze, a Tony-winner for the original production of The Color Purple), but all the featured cast were superb in the musical numbers and the chorus measured up equally. I don’t like to single any one performer out here, but I must say that Chuck Cooper (Tony for The Life), as the Head Man, has a genuinely stirring baritone that resonates throughout the theater. (We were in the middle of the mezzanine.) Beyond that, all of the singers brought character and emotion to the songs that stood in excellently for the acting in the missing book scenes. (For those who don’t know the Encores! process, the concerts are only rehearsed for eight days, plus one dress rehearsal. The actors carry scripts for many of the book scenes.) Needless to say, the standards like “Taking a Chance” and “Happiness” were joys to hear, especially so gorgeously rendered, but there were also nice surprises among the less-well-known pieces, like “Do What You Wanna Do,” sung by Cooper’s Head Man (a paean to . . . well, devilry) and Georgia Brown’s saucy “Honey in the Honeycomb,” vibrantly sung by Hughes (and which I urge someone to revive in a contemporary pop or rock style).
Between the simplistic book and the cuts for the concert presentation, the characters are pretty simple. Nonetheless, the company gave them color and dimension beyond the mere words Root provided them. This is down to Santiago-Hudson, too, of course—though given the short rehearsal schedule, the actors would have had to do a lot of (quick) work on their own. Perhaps the hardest characters to fill out were the Head Man and the Lord’s General because they’re essentially allegorical figures with no back story. Yet both Cooper and Norm Lewis (Tony nomination for The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess) brought a sense of humor and a kind of frat house competitiveness to the parts that prevented them from being the stiffs they could have been.
Of course, one of the great pleasures of the Encores! concert performances of seldom-seen musicals is hearing the score played 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 i