Zigler’s staging is not as varied or inventive as Scott Edmiston’s of A Marvelous Party! Neither are the songs interspersed with amusing or revelatory snippets of narrative as they were in the Coward show. This is a straightforward cabaret that nonetheless depends on the acting chops of its cast, who can sing but don’t make their living at it, to put the songs across. And don’t get me wrong: acting, for the most part, does not mean mugging and winking and cavorting. There is some of that in the frisky finale, a medley of “Let’s Misbehave” and “You’re the Top,” and a medley of “Anything Goes” and “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” deploys projected photos of outré moments from ART shows to illustrate the former. But the warbling thespians work to capture the yearning in Porter’s love songs, wherein heartache wars with reserve.
Airaldi, so often deployed in fool’s cap or a dress, is given several straightforward love songs — “Do I Love You,” “So in Love,” and “I Am in Love” — and he delivers them with a touching clarity. He also brings his razory mischievousness to Porter’s tale of a “social-climbing bivalve” in “Tale of the Oyster.” MacDonald, looking like a diaphanous bit of earth and ocean in her second-act deck wear, gets to do her share of torching, in a very deliberate “Night and Day” and a silky “Miss Otis Regrets.” Nahigian counters with the saucy “Always True to You in My Fashion.” Derrah strains on “Begin the Beguine,” but he and MacDonald bring some interesting, dissonant harmonies to “From This Moment On,” and he puts a crisp, cynical edge on “It’s All Right with Me.” The dapper LeBow, crooning from the piano, shows you can be lascivious and sweet at once on “All of You.” And when it comes to the intricately rhymed, tongue-twisting Porter patter, you’re glad to be listening to actors rather than some more-melodious mush-mouths.
Related:
Brush up your Porter, Making a connection, Balancing act, More 
- Brush up your Porter
With its supreme Cole Porter score and its robustly entertaining book by Sam and Bella Spewack, the 1948 Kiss Me, Kate is surely one of the half-dozen best Broadway musicals.
- Making a connection
"Everything old is new again" never seems more true than with the evanescent art form of dance.
- Balancing act
In Jean-Paul Sartre's play, Will LeBow and Karen MacDonald feel the earth move under their feet.
- Love bites
Noël Coward may not have been born in a trunk, but he moved into one early.
- Review: The Seagull, The Corn Is Green
The Seagull begins with a theatrical experiment — a brief symbolist drama dreamed by young Konstantin Treplev, who's struggling toward artistic expression while endeavoring to showcase his girlfriend and impress his actress mother.
- Poetry in motion
The eyes have it in Love’s Labour’s Lost , in which ocular imagery duels with what Harold Bloom calls a “florabundance of language” in the arch arias of courtier Berowne, who sees himself writ large in the “pitch-ball” peepers of Rosaline.
- Close companions
The characters of Jean-Paul Sartre’s iconic 1944 one-act No Exit are in Hell.
- Re-entry
There’s a pointed irony surrounding the return of the American Repertory Theatre’s No Exit : if Hell is other people, then why are all the actors so thrilled to be working together again?
- The green governor?
Governor Deval Patrick promised to bring new faces and fresh perspectives to his administration, and he certainly has done that.
- Lincoln Yule log
Abraham Lincoln, as he said in his second inaugural address, yearned to "bind up the nation's wounds." Since the great man was assassinated little more than a month later, he didn't quite get around to it. No worry, Paula Vogel has taken over the job with A Civil War Christmas: An American Musical Celebration.
- Voice choices
Julie Hardy and Stacey Kent come at jazz singing from opposite ends of the spectrum.
- Less
Topics:
Theater
, Entertainment, Frank Sinatra, Otis Regrets, More
, Entertainment, Frank Sinatra, Otis Regrets, Ronald Reagan, Robert F. Kennedy, Tip O'Neill, Lyndon Johnson, Performing Arts, Gertrude Stein, Truman Capote, Less
