By Harry Haun
25 Apr 2012
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| Matthew Broderick and Kelli O'Hara; guests Donna Murphy, David Hyde Pierce and Rachel York |
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| Photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN |
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The Gershwins' Nice Work If You Can Get It reworks George and Ira's big hit of '26, Oh, Kay! — and on April 24 it returned to its original launching site, the Imperial, where "Someone to Watch Over Me" and "Do, Do, Do" rang out anew.
Those two songs and our hero's name, Jimmy Winter, turn out to be all that's Oh, Kay! Everything else is Joe DiPietro. "Inspired by material by Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse," as the Playbill cover page points out, adaptor DiPietro — the two-Tonyed man from Memphis — let his imagination luxuriate over the Gershwin songbook until he found some irresistible evergreens suitable for transplanting in a storyline of cheery inconsequence and mindless merriment.
What he has come up with for Kelli O'Hara, musical theatre's darling of the day, is her first bootlegger role. He has thrown her some tough talk to toss off, and costumer Martin Pakledinaz has added a newsboy cap and pants — and voila! we have Billie Bendix, a hooch-running renegade of the Prohibition.
Enter woozily the aforementioned Jimmy Winter (Matthew Broderick to the rest of us), a tanked-up millionaire reeling down the aisle a fourth time. Billie/Kelli helps herself to his billfold and has her gang of two — Cookie McGee (Michael McGrath) and Duke Mahoney (Chris Sullivan) — stash their booze on his Long Island estate, where they secure work as domestics to keep an eye on their ill-gotten goods. Both of Billie's hoods square off with improbable damsels — Cookie with a booze-busting duchess (Judy Kaye), Duke with a ditzy flapper (Robyn Hurder). The Gail Patrick role of Jimmy's disposable fiancée is an Eileen Evergreen (Jennifer Laura Thompson), daughter of a stuffy senator (Terry Beaver). Two scenes from the end, Jimmy's take-charge mother (Estelle Parsons) arrives on the scene to sort out all of the above.
Everybody has a song to sing, it seems, so Gershwin standards are strung like pearls throughout the proceedings — "Sweet and Lowdown," "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off," "Do It Again," "'S Wonderful," "Fascinating Rhythm," "Lady Be Good," "But Not for Me," "By Strauss," "I've Got a Crush on You," "They All Laughed," "Blah, Blah, Blah."






