Show Within a Show, Within a Memory
Ben BrantleyNovember 9, 2014: An urgent request to the helium suppliers of New York: Can you please deliver as many canisters of the stuff as you can spare to City Center, posthaste? There’s a big, bright balloon of a show there that just won’t inflate. Even hot air would be welcome, in a pinch. The Band Wagon, which opened on Sunday as an Encores! Special Event that runs through next weekend, looks as if it could be a lark if it could ever get itself airborne. As it is, this adaptation of the beloved 1953 MGM movie musical lies on the stage like a peppy old friend who has been mysteriously felled by depression. “Come on,” you might say to such a friend. “Pull yourself together. You’ve got so much going for you.” And I imagine many of the talented people involved in the production, directed and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall, keep saying something similar to one another. Yet this Band Wagon, a troubled musical about a musical in trouble, only rarely shakes off its torpor. It’s not for want of exertion, or for promising and essential ingredients like a rousing vintage score (by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz), a charismatic star (in the person of Brian Stokes Mitchell) and a supporting cast packed with pros polished and quirky (including Laura Osnes, Tony Sheldon, Tracey Ullman and Michael McKean).
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