So, will According to Tip garner the warm reception outside Massachusetts that the New Rep audience accorded it? Listen, compared with last summer’s lusterless RFK, this show, which the production team hopes to cart to New York, DC, and Dublin, is sunshine with a shot of whiskey and a stogie. Especially given Howard’s warm, sly performance, and the intent to trim, it should prove to have legs — even if they stand sturdiest in O’Neill’s native soil. In Boston the great man — arguably a mastodon of New Deal liberalism by the time he hung up his influence and surrendered his gavel — has already been turned into a federal building and an expensive tunnel. Now he’s a one-man show. Which proves that honorees can come in small packages, too.
American Repertory Theatre hoisted the bubbly to Noël Coward in last year’s A Marvelous Party! This summer the troupe toasts Cole Porter in When It’s Hot, It’s Cole! (at Zero Arrow Club through July 20). But all is not bubbles and black tie when it comes to Porter, who asks, in “I Am in Love,” “Should I order cyanide/Or order champagne?” The question speaks to the tortured tone of many of the closeted composer’s love ballads, and it gleams persistently beneath this revue, even when the surface brims with the bravura intricacy of Porter’s fabled “list songs” and the quirkiness of novelty numbers from mostly forgotten shows, among them “I’ve a Shooting Box in Scotland” from Porter’s first Broadway outing, the 1916 See America First, which lasted just 15 performances.
Nobody needs me to tell him or her that Porter’s songs are, in his own words, “the top.” From the ’20s to the ’50s he spewed them out — the haunting jazz melodies, the incomparably showy or sophisticated lyrics. One wonders why a cottage industry hasn’t grown out of inventing new book musicals to house his ditties, as continues to happen with the Gershwins — especially since, except for Anything Goes (which did get a new libretto by Timothy Crouse and John Weidman) and Kiss Me Kate, the Porter shows are seldom revived. The revues, however, abound, and now there’s this new one conceived by director Scott Zigler and Peter Bayne, with musical arrangements by Bayne that are boiled down to vocals and a single piano manned by music director Miranda Loud.
Zigler fields the resident ART quartet of Remo Airaldi, Thomas Derrah, Will LeBow, and Karen MacDonald (the dramatis personae of the Elliot Norton Award–winning Coward cabaret), with the addition of fresh-faced recent ART Institute grad Angela Nahigian, who, slinking through the first act in a clingy black gown, her long hair rolled at the temples and gathered in a net, looks to have been dropped from the sky of the 1940s. Just keep in mind: these are singing actors, not the song-styling likes of Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. But, hey, if Gwyneth Paltrow can slither through “What Is This Thing Called Love?” in the Truman Capote bio-pic Infamous, why not them?
