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'Make Someone Happy!'
Reviews
The Story of a Creative Duo, Told Through Their Songs
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Life would be a snap if you followed some basic musical comedy advice. Make someone else happy, and you will be happy too. Remember that every day comes once in a lifetime, so make the most of every day; and so on and so forth. Those useful tips are embedded in the song lyrics of Betty Comden and Adolph Green, the dearly beloved team to whom Mark Nadler and K T Sullivan pay affectionate tribute in their effervescent cabaret show "Make Someone Happy." According to Mr. Nadler and Ms. Sullivan, Comden and Green were hard workers who met every day for 60 years.
This shiny soap bubble of a show, which plays at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel, isn't an ordinary anthology. Twenty songs with Comden and Green lyrics are ingeniously woven with bits of dialogue from six of their screenplays — "The Barkleys of Broadway," "On the Town," "Singin' in the Rain," "The Band Wagon," "It's Always Fair Weather" and "Bells Are Ringing" — into a nonsensical pastiche that beneath its scatterbrained surface must have entailed some serious archival scholarship.
Mr. Nadler, a hyperkinetic piano man, and Ms. Sullivan, an eternal kewpie doll with a sly sense of humor and a real voice, plunge into it with the verve of a latter-day Mickey and Judy. What they have created is a savvy, witty distillation of musical comedy's golden age of optimistic escape. The versatility of a Comden and Green lyric can be illustrated by the transformation of "Never Met a Man I Didn't Like" (from "The Will Rogers Follies") from a friendly assertion of belief in people, constructed around Rogers's motto, into a sultry bump-and-grind for Ms. Sullivan to sing while twirling a black feather boa.
But the real showstopper, "Catch Our Act at the Met" (from "Two on the Aisle"), with music by Jule Styne, is an operatic spoof that drops names like "Dickie" Wagner and "Jake" Puccini. "Faust" is also a strand of the silly plot that sends this Mickey and Judy to Coney Island. Highbrow or lowbrow, it's all the same in musical-comedy never-never land, where happy endings rule. "Make Someone Happy" runs through April 14 at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel, 59 West 44th Street, Manhattan.
BY WILL FRIEDWALD
Taking a show tune or even a jazz standard (like "Caravan") and placing it in a new context is an indispensable part of a jazz musician's arsenal. Cabaret singers do the same thing in a different way when they take a song from a musical comedy and place it in the context of a one- or two-person nightclub set. With their new production, "Make Someone Happy," the team of K.T. Sullivan and Mark Nadler elevate the concept of re-contextualization to a whole new level.
It's a brilliant move for the Oak Room's first couple. I've long thought the traditional songbook show, in which the songs of a single composer or team are interspersed with biographical factoids, was not something that they did as well as, say, Mary Cleere Haran or Eric Comstock.
What Mr. Nadler and Ms. Sullivan do better than almost anyone, however, is comedy; I would much rather hear them spout punch lines with their trademark impeccable comic timing than rattle off names and dates. In the new show, wisely subtitled "The Words of Betty Comden & Adolf Green" (who, like Ms. Sullivan and Mr. Nadler, were strictly a platonic partnership), they not only treat us to songs from a dozen shows, but hammer together dialogue from that many films into a gloriously ersatz new narrative — it's kind of the cabaret equivalent of sampling. They sing wonderfully, to the tune of Mr. Nadler's increasingly sophisticated and contrapuntal medley arrangements (with their familiar Broadway style modulations). But what really makes the show so entertaining is the incongruous, almost Dadaist way the twosome radically juxtaposes the lines and plots of such classic musicals as "The Bandwagon" and "On the Town." Never before had I realized that the line "I had Miss Hodges too" could have a double meaning, or that "Never Met a Man I Didn't Like" — the Will Rogers maxim transformed into song — could be taken for a Blue Angel-like résumé of sexual conquests, a requiem for a "cooch dancer," sung in Coney Island, "Playground of the Rich."
It's good to know, to quote that eminent sage Lena Lamont (in "Singin' in the Rain"), that their "hard work ain't been in vain fer nothin'!"