| Blackhurst
shines in 'Red, Hot & Blue!'
October 27, 2005
By Chad Jones
Inside Bay Area
IT'S delightful. It's delicious. It's
de-Klea.
There are several reasons to enjoy Cole Porter's "Red,
Hot & Blue!," the season-opener for 42nd Street Moon,
the Bay Area's resident musical theater historical society.
Three of Porter's snazziest songs pop up in the score, including
the delectable "It's DeLovely."
But the real reason to see this show, which opened Saturday
at San Francisco's Eureka Theatre, is its star, Klea Blackhurst.
A sensation in the cabaret world, Blackhurst burst onto the
scene with a show called "Everything the Traffic Will
Allow," a salute to one of her idols, Ethel Merman. With
charm and humor Blackhurst unleashed a voice that could have
given old iron-lungs Merman a run for her money.
Granted, Blackhurst's voice is somewhat softer and sweeter
than Merman's foghorn, but there's a similar electrical charge
in the big notes that lets you know you're in the presence
of a musical theater star.
In an obvious but brilliant move, 42nd Street Moon co-founder
Greg MacKellan hired Blackhurst to fill Merman's shoes in
"Red, Hot & Blue!" a 1936 show that Porter and
book writers Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse hoped would
duplicate the success of their "Anything Goes."
"Red, Hot" was a big hit, but with Merman warbling
Porter tunes alongside Bob Hope, Jimmy Durante and a pre-"I
Love Lucy" Vivian Vance, you could hardly go wrong.
"Red, Hot & Blue!" has all but disappeared from
the musical theater landscape, and watching the show in 42nd
Street Moon's well-staged concert version, it's easy to see
why.
There's an over-abundance of silly plot involving society
dames, paroled convicts, greedy senators and a massively successful
get-rich-quick scheme.
Blackhurst is Nails O'Reilly Duquesne, a former manicurist
and now a wealthy widow whose goal in life is to help prisoners
get back on their feet. She's in love with her lawyer Bob
Hale (Steve Rhyne in the Bob Hope role), who helps her concoct
a fund-raising lottery to support her parole assistance efforts.
But when a parolee named Policy Pinkle (Kalon Thibodeaux)
gets involved, the lottery turns into a nationwide craze that
ends up raising $1 billion.
Of course the government wants a piece of that, so a group
of senators get involved
and the whole country goes nuts trying to reunite a man with
the mysterious love of his life, a girl who used to be called
Baby and could be identified by the waffle iron scar on her
behind (don't ask).
It's all pure silliness, as musicals so often were then, but
"Red, Hot & Blue" is especially silly because
it so often forgets it's a musical. There are long stretches
of "comedy" that misses as often as it hits, and
too few great songs.
But then along come nifty tunes like "Down in the Depths
on the 90th Floor," and everything's better, at least
for a while.
Blackhurst, accompanied by musical director Dave Dobrusky
on piano, nails the jaunty ballad and gives us our first Merman
jolt of the evening.
Then she and Rhyne tackle the lengthy "De-Lovely"
to tell the entire story of a romance, from first blush to
marriage to old age. The song is marvelous, and so are the
performances, especially when the singers harmonize.
Act 1 ends with another Blackhurst burst on "Ridin' High,"
but then Act 2 fails to produce another really terrific song.
The title tune should be irresistible along the lines of "Anything
Goes," but "Red, Hot & Blue!" is merely
pleasant.
Aside from providing the opportunity to see a seldom-produced
work by an American master, this production offers some disarming
supporting performances from Thibodeaux, working hard to generate
some Durante-sized comedy, and Deirdre O'Neil as Peaches LaFleur,
a squeaky-voiced maid who used to work the streets.
Director MacKellan and ever-reliable choreographer Jayne Zaban
enliven the proceedings as much as possible, and of course
Blackhurst is great. But you can only do so much with a show
that promises to be red, hot and blue and turns out to be
none of the above.
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