[Dixielandjazz] "Cotton Club Parade" reviewed -- Variety, November 21, 2011

[Robert Ringwald]

Duke Ellington's Cotton Club Parade (New York City Center; 2,256 seats; $125 top)
by Steven Suskin
Variety, November 21, 2011
The resplendently renovated City Center puts its best foot forward, with tap shoes,
in "Cotton Club Parade." Wynton Marsalis and his Jazz at Lincoln Center team merge
with the folks at Encores! for this breezy revue celebrating the sounds and styles
of the Prohibition-era nitery which reigned over Harlem from 1924-1936. (While Duke
Ellington is top-billed, almost half the score comes from composers Harold Arlen
and Jimmy McHugh.) Adriane Lenox and Brandon Victor Dixon commandingly lead the singers,
the dance specialties astonish and the brass and reed players in Marsalis' orchestra
stomp and wail and rock the newly-restored rafters.
With no text to interrupt, this "Parade" features 24 musical spots in succession.
Ninety-minute show is presented without an intermission, making it the briefest Encores!
evening in memory. "Cotton Club Parade" is officially not part of that long-running
subscription series, though, but what they call "An Encores! Special Event." There
is some inevitable slow going here and there, but it is always picked up and rejuvenated
by those blaring trumpets.
Serving as something of a host is Dixon (an original cast member of "The Scottsboro
Boys"). "I've Got the World on a String" sets the tone for the show, with Dixon charming
us and seeming to be pulled aloft by a red helium balloon. Also on hand (with limited
opportunities) is Everett Bradley, who leads a quartet in a fine rendition of "Digga
Digga Doo."
It is Lenox, a Tony winner for her dramatic turn opposite Cherry Jones in John Patrick
Shanley's "Doubt," who altogether steals the show with two comedy songs, Sippie Wallace's
"Women Be Wise" and Ethel Waters' "Go Back Where You Stayed Last Night." Lenox commands
the stage like -- well, like Ethel Waters, delivering each entendre be it double
or triple. Highpoint other than Lenox is Jared Grimes, dancing his way through his
self-choreographed "Goin' Nuts."
Evening's slight miscalculation is to fill the card with seventeen soloists; nobody
gets more than two or three spots. While this brings us a fair number of strong performers,
especially in the dance area, it doesn't allow anyone other than Lenox to standout.
(Carla Cook, who sings three classics -- "Stormy Weather," "I Can't Give You Anything
but Love" and "Ill Wind" -- doesn't quite land them, alas.)
Sometimes, as in the instrumental "Braggin' in Brass," it's more than enough just
to hear the band explode. Director-choreographer Warren Carlyle, an Encores! mainstay
whose work is currently on view in "Hugh Jackman Back on Broadway" and "Follies,"
includes some impressive group numbers, recreating what one must suppose is the feeling
of a Cotton Club floorshow. Many of the featured dancers, though, seem to be contributing
their own steps.
Sitting upstage center with his trumpet, Marsalis is one of the main attractions
of the affair. "Cotton Club Parade" marks the first collaboration between Jazz at
Lincoln Center and Encores!, which plan to give us a new show every two years. This
one perfectly blends the strengths of the two orgs.
Renovated City Center looks like a million bucks, or rather, $56 million. The City
Center board made the gutsy decision to solve the cramped seating and sight line
problems by reconfiguring the house and reducing the former capacity of 2,750 by
some five hundred seats. All new seating and newly-raked risers in the mezzanine
and balcony make this one of the most comfortable houses in town. A non-scientific
survey indicates that City Center now has considerably more restroom stalls than
the larger Carnegie and Avery Fisher Halls. The ornate decoration of the house --
originally Mecca Temple, built in 1923 by the Shriners -- has been gloriously restored,
too.
_______________________________________
by Robert Gottlieb
New York Observer, November 21, 2011
The Encores! series and Jazz at Lincoln Center blasted off their new collaboration
with a spectacular show called "Cotton Club Parade" -- all-singing, all-dancing,
all-Ellington. (Even the non-Ellington numbers sound like his.) Of course a big theater
like the City Center can't replicate the feeling of an intimate place like the Cotton
Club -- for one thing, they didn't have miking back in the day. (Lucky them.) And
presumably a show at the club was relaxed: pauses between numbers; waiters passing
through with drinks clinking; customers coming and going. Whereas the "Parade" is
a semi-Broadway show, and one of its strongest virtues is that it's driven at breakneck
speed through its 23 numbers -- its energy is never allowed to falter; even segues
are ultraminimal. And there's no intermission. But authenticity of venue isn't the
point. You leave the performance with a real sense of the variety, the ingenuity,
the sheer fun of what things must have been like up on 125th Street in the '20s and
'30s.
One difference is the absence of big star performers. It's not that they weren't
cast; it's that we don't have them anymore. Apart from Wynton Marsalis, listed as
"Music Director and Trumpet" -- his jazz band is fabulous -- there aren't many names
the average theater- or dancegoer is likely to recognize. The Cotton Club was home,
on and off, not only to Ellington but to Fletcher Henderson, Louis Armstrong, Cab
Calloway and Fats Waller; to Ethel Waters, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, the Nicholas
Brothers and the young Lena Horne. There's no one of their startling originality
on the stage of the City Center. But there are performer after performer of total
capability, and a few real standouts. The widely experienced tap dancer Jared Grimes
comes on just before the end (excellent strategy) and steals the show with his "Goin'
Nuts," choreographed by himself; with his brilliant technique and happy, generous
nature he restores tap to itself after the gloomy, self-absorbed work of Savion Glover
and his imitators. Jeremiah "Showtyme" Haynes also makes you happy with his rubbery
legs and torso in the duet "Hottentot." The whole company, led by the exemplary Brandon
Victor Dixon, comes together in an old-time whoop-it-up number, "Freeze and Melt,"
infectiously staged by the show's director and choreographer, Warren Carlyle (currently
responsible for "Follies" and "Hugh Jackman: Back on Broadway"). The one false note
is Garth Fagan's choreography to Ellington's "Black and Tan Fantasy," danced here
by Nicolette DePass: it, and she, seem too balletic and soupy to have made it at
the Cotton Club, and her technique isn't what it might be.
One fascination was the reconstruction of a five-man group of tappers in a number
called "Peckin.'" They're lined up, one behind the other, in their tuxedos and black
patent leather shoes; gravely they tap onto the stage; they kick out; they change
direction; they tap off, still in lockstep. You can see the original Five Blazers
on YouTube -- and you should. That was real synchronicity: those five boys are one
organism. The five guys who replicate this number in "Cotton Club Parade" do a fine
job of imitation, but they're five guys, not a quintipede. (Or for purists, a decapede.)


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
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