rest of her life doing good. Since that’s down to Little Joe, the Lord’s General explains, Joe’s soul is saved and he gets to accompany Petunia to Heaven.
I included a brief description of Encores! and its mission in my report on Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella (10 April 2014). The series’ home since it’s inception in 1994, New York City Center at 131 W. 55th Street (between 6th and 7th Avenues), was built in 1923 as the Mecca Temple of the Shriners. Replacing a movie house on the site, the current building is in the Neo-Moorish style with myriad polychrome tiles both in the interior decor and on the exterior façade forming mosaics. The tiled roof dome is 54 feet tall. The association met at the temple until the stock market crash of 1929 made it impossible for the Mecca Shriners to pay the taxes on the building.
In the 1940s, the building became the property of New York City and, threatened with demolition, it was converted in 1943 by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia into the city’s first performing arts center. The main stage seats 2,257 patrons and on the lower level there are two smaller theaters which seat 299 and 150 spectators each; there are also four studios in the center. Today, New York City Center is home to a number of performing arts troupes such as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the Manhattan Theatre Club, the Flamenco Festival, and the Martha Graham Dance Company, among others. (MTC occupies the two lower-level houses.) Encores! Off-Center, a spin-off of Encores! that focuses on Off-Broadway shows, was launched at City Center in the summer of 2013 under the artistic directorship of composer Jeanine Tesori. In 2000, the American Theatre Wing awarded Encores! a Tony for Excellence in Theatre.
The show has the reputation of having a terrific score but a weak book, and that turns out to be accurate. (In New York’s Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz judged it: “Score, 10; book, 3 — or maybe 2 in this case.”) That fact, however, makes it perfect material for a concert presentation, which dispenses with much of the libretto to focus on the score and the singing of the Broadway vets in the cast. Certainly the characters are one-dimensional and unsophisticated, and the story, which seems to owe a little to Goethe’s Faust (a completion between God and Satan for one man’s soul, a set period of time after which the man in question will lose his soul, and a sudden reprieve at the last moment which sends his soul to Heaven instead of Hell; see my recent post, “Faust Clones, Part 1,” 15 January 2016), is a bare-bones plot on which to hang the songs and dances, which have more to offer. (I can only imagine the dances conceived by Balanchine, one of the great choreographers in ballet as well as on Broadway, and Dunham, a renowned dancer-chorographer of the mid-20th century, since there’s no record of what they looked like and the Encores! stage, largely occupied by the 31-piece orchestra, leaves little room for elaborate movement.)
Director Santiago-Hudson managed quite well on the cramped stage—made even more space-challenged by the two large thrones for the emissaries of God and Satan, accompanied by their minions, which were nearly always present at stage left and right. (The next world’s agents weren’t just a decorative entourage: the two trios added marvelous harmony to their masters’ songs, like otherworldly Pips or Raylettes.) Most of the story doesn’t require a lot of physical action—the bar scene in act two is an exception—and Santiago-Hudson kept the show moving without drawing attention to the space problem. So did choreographer Camille A. Brown, who must have had a tougher job as the dances were generally quite energetic (Dziemianowicz called them “sinewy and spirited,” which is exactly right) and usually involved several members of the company up to the entire ensemble. (The full cast for this presentation of Cabin was 46—probably another reason the show isn’t revived.)
Santiago-Hudson clearly cast the best voices he could find—not to take anything away from the acting. Some of the actors are already well k