Parisian dance halls of the 1890s get a makeover for this revamped Cole Porter revival at Paper Mill Playhouse

“Money spent on pleasure is never a waste,” says La Mome Pistache, our bawdy dance hall hostess from Montmartre. This air of unapologetic gaiety is precisely what breathes such joyful life into Paper Mill Playhouse’s indulgent revival of Can-Can — a production with its eyes on a Broadway run later this season. Broadway vets Jason Danieley and Kate Baldwin lead an extraordinary company of dancers and musical-theater hams as the rules-obsessed Judge Aristide Forestier and his former love from the other side of the tracks, Pistache (known in her younger days as Mathilde). The classic Cole Porter score, featuring a roster of numbers ranging from the sultry “I Love Paris” to the comic “Every Man Is a Stupid Man,” could not have found two more beautiful voices to pick up the old chestnut. Despite a dated premise, the piece has significantly fewer cobwebs thanks to book writer and director David Lee and his coauthor Joel Fields, who have revamped Abe Burrows’ original work.