Theater Review: At Encores!, Lady, Be Good!

Sometimes — and I mean this in a good way — the Encores! series at City Center seems like the musical equivalent of A Night at the Museum, making the dinosaurs dance. That’s certainly the case with its delightful 22nd-season opener, Lady, Be Good!, the 1924 comedy that featured George and Ira Gershwin’s debut score on Broadway. (Working alone or as a team, the brothers had contributed individual songs to shows since 1918.) True, the bones of Lady, Be Good! are so creaky, they must be held up with strings, but the mounting, and the superb restoration where needed, let you see something fascinating that would hardly be visible otherwise: how the American musical grew into itself. Were it not for that, it’s hard to argue that a relic like Lady, Be Good! would be worth the enormous effort Encores! put into it, including a nearly complete new orchestration and the hiring of Tommy Tune out of semi-retirement to dance two numbers. The original book, by Guy Bolton and Fred Thompson, only barely clears the low bar for cogency set by operetta and vaudeville, the forebear genres from which our musical theater evolved. The story is so threadbare that even Adele Astaire, who starred in the original with her brother, Fred, called it “tacky” and “weak.”