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New York Times
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Stephen Mo Hanan, Who Played Three Roles in ‘Cats,' Dies at 78
Stephen Mo Hanan, a vibrant performer who sang arias and other music as a busker in San Francisco before playing Kevin Kline's lieutenant in the acclaimed 1981 Broadway production of 'The Pirates of Penzance' and three felines in the original Broadway cast of 'Cats,' died on April 3 at his home in Manhattan. He was 78. Gary Widlund, his husband and only immediate survivor, said the cause was a heart attack. At his audition for 'Cats,' Mr. Hanan (pronounced HAN-un) told Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer, and Trevor Nunn, the director, that he had spent several years singing and accompanying himself on a concertina at a ferry terminal at the foot of Market Street in San Francisco. 'As a matter of fact, I've brought my concertina,' he recalled telling Mr. Nunn in an interview with The Washington Post in 1982. 'He said, 'Give me something in Italian.' Well, I've never had a problem with shyness. I sang 'Funiculi, Funicula.'' Mr. Hanan was ultimately cast in three parts: Bustopher Jones, a portly cat, and the dual role of Asparagus, an aging theater cat, who, while reminiscing, transforms (with help from an inflatable costume) into a former role, Growltiger, a tough pirate, and performs a parody of Puccini's 'Turandot.' During rehearsals, Mr. Hanan kept a detailed journal, which he published in 2002 as 'A Cat's Diary.' In an entry about the second day of rehearsal, he described an assignment from Mr. Nunn: to 'pick a cartoon cat we know of, withdraw to ourselves and prepare a vignette of that cat, then return to the circle and each in turn will present.' He continued: 'I choose Fritz the Cat,' the Robert Crumb character, 'making a pass at some kitty. Watching the others is a gas — people's individualities are beginning to emerge.' He and another cast member, Harry Groener, were both nominated for the Tony Award for best featured actor in a musical. They both lost; the tap dancer Charles (Honi) Coles won for 'My One and Only.' In the years following 'Cats,' Mr. Hanan's many roles included Moonface Martin in 'Anything Goes,' at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis; the double role of Voltaire and Dr. Pangloss in 'Candide,' at the Huntington Theater in Boston; and another dual role, Mr. Darling and Captain Hook, in 'Peter Pan,' on Broadway and on tour. He also portrayed the villainous innkeeper Thenardier in 'Les Miserables' in London. In 1999, Mr. Hanan created a stage role of his own: Al Jolson, the popular vaudevillian who performed in blackface, sang on Broadway and starred in 'The Jazz Singer,' the pioneering sound motion picture. 'Jolson & Co.,' which Mr. Hanan wrote with Jay Berkow, was staged Off Broadway, at the York Theater Company. Al Jolson 'was pure id,' Mr. Hanan, who bore a physical resemblance to him, told Harvard magazine in 2002, when the show was revived at the Century Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan. 'He didn't censor himself, neither his joy nor his rage. With Jolson you can be completely over the top; you have to be. His personality demands that kind of size.' 'Jolson & Co.' recreates a 1946 radio interview with Barry Gray as a way of looking back on his remarkable life. Mr. Hanan sang many of the songs Mr. Jolson was known for, including 'Swanee' and 'California, Here I Come.' Reviewing the show in New York magazine, John Simon praised Mr. Hanan's performance as 'mostly impersonation but, as such, unbeatable.' He added, 'On top of the Jolson looks, the incarnator has absorbed all the vocal, facial, and kinetic mannerisms as if he had stolen the man's very soul.' Mr. Hanan was born Stephen Hanan Kaplan on Jan. 7, 1947, in Washington. His mother, Lottie (Klein) Kaplan, was a high school English teacher; his father, Jonah Kaplan, was a pharmacist. While attending Harvard College, Stephen performed in theatrical productions at the Loeb Drama Center and with the Hasty Pudding Club. He acquired the nickname Mo on a trip to Bermuda during college, after a friend, the future Broadway librettist John Weidman, observed that his outfit made him look like 'some guy named Mo who cleans cabanas in the Catskills,' Mr. Hanan told the website TheaterMania in 2002. After graduating in 1968 with a bachelor's degree in English literature, he studied for a year at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art on a Fulbright fellowship. Back in New York, he had difficulty landing roles, so in 1971 he moved to San Francisco, where he lived on a commune and spent six years singing for money, mostly at the ferry terminal, which earned him enough to spend winters in Mexico and Guatemala. Once, outside the stage door at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, he encountered Luciano Pavarotti, who had just performed in Verdi's 'Un Ballo in Maschera,' and summoned the nerve to sing for the great tenor. 'I raced to the money note and he, exclaiming 'Che voce d'oro' — or 'What a golden voice' — beckoned me over amid applause,' Mr. Hanan wrote in an unpublished essay. After returning to New York again, he landed small parts in New York Shakespeare Festival productions of 'All's Well That Ends Well' and 'The Taming of the Shrew' in Central Park in 1978. (Around that time, he dropped his surname and began using his middle name instead, because there was another actor with a similar name.) In 1980, the director Wilford Leach cast him as Samuel, the second in command to Mr. Kline's Pirate King, in the Shakespeare in the Park production of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operetta 'The Pirates of Penzance,' which also starred Linda Ronstadt. Mr. Hanan stayed with the show when it moved to Broadway in 1981. Rex Smith, who played Frederic, the male romantic lead, said in an interview that Mr. Hanan 'embodied all that was required to be the Pirate King's lieutenant, and for that you had to stand and deliver every night — if you're not going to be keelhauled.' In 2006, Mr. Hanan moved up in rank to play the Major-General in a Yiddish-language version of 'Pirates' (called 'Di Yam Gazlonim!'), put on by the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan (now the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan). Allen Lewis Rickman, the director, of that show recalled that Mr. Hanan did not know Yiddish and had to learn his lines phonetically. 'He was quite a character and very entertaining, one of those people who you know is a real pro,' Mr. Rickman said in an interview. 'He had a clownish streak — that was his first instinct — but not in a scene-stealing way.'
Time Out
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Pirates! The Penzance Musical
Broadway review by Adam Feldman This show is of a kind that I shall dub an operettical: A British-Broadway hybrid that is cleverly synthetical. It starts with operetta of the comical variety That Sullivan and Gilbert wrote to tickle high society. The Pirates of Penzance, a pageant witty and Victorian, Premiered in 1880 on our calendar Gregorian. It still is entertaining but perhaps not in a date-night way; It seems a bit too fusty for revival on the Great White Way. So Rupert Holmes has come along to pump some Broadway jazz in it: To add a little spice and put some Dixieland pizzazz in it. And thanks to these injections, neither rev'rent nor heretical, We now have Holmes's model for a modern operettical. Pirates! The Penzance Musical | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus Best known for Drood (and also for his hit 'Piña Colada Song'), He hasn't wrecked the story or egregiously forgot a song. But to ensure the whole endeavor's jazzier and bluer leans, He takes the show from Cornwall and resets it down in New Orleans. The Crescent City's sass and brass have quite rejuvenated it As Joe Joubert and Daryl Waters have reorchestrated it. (They've also added melodies that never here have been afore, On loan from Iolanthe, The Mikado and from Pinafore.) With silliness and energy the show is chockablock, well-set Amid the brightly colored NOLA streets of David Rockwell's set. And now that we have looked at questions musico-aesthetical, We move on to the plot of this diverting operettical. Pirates! The Penzance Musical | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus The Pirate King swashbuckles on a large if not momentous ship Where Frederic, turning 21, is ending his apprenticeship. And when this duty-driven laddie reaches his majority His conscience will demand that he accept the law's authority. Upon that time, young Frederic knows, though he may feel a loss acute, His former pals, the pirates, he will have to fight and prosecute. (Unless, that is, some hitherto-undreamed-of technicality Should come to light and complicate his noble plan's legality.) But what if Frederic's former nurse, the sorely misbegotten Ruth, Discovers in some document an old and long-forgotten truth? It might, if this scenario's not strictly theoretical, Entail a major conflict in this model operettical. Pirates! The Penzance Musical | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus Scott Ellis's direction is all tongue-in-cheek dramatical And Warren Carlyle's dances are enjoyably emphatical But notwithstanding those behind-the-scenesters' benefactions here, It's fair to say the actors are the principal attractions here. The Pirate King's embodied by a glist'ning Ramin Karimloo (Inspiring more dropped panties than you'd find in any harem loo) And you could comb through New Orleans and all surrounding parishes, And never find a Frederic as pluperfect as Nick Barasch's. The Drag Race legend Jinkx Monsoon, all blowsy eccentricity, Brings Ruth to life with vocal chops and facial elasticity. Performances italicized (and not just parenthetical) Combine to lift the spirits of this lively operettical. Pirates! The Penzance Musical | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus Samantha Williams makes a lusty Mabel; Preston Truman Boyd Delivers his tap-dancing like an ably-programmed humanoid. But David Hyde Pierce steals the show, I say with no cajolery. His Major-Gen'ral is a master class in brilliant drollery: A rapid-patter songster with aplomb matched by no other's style (And daughters pirates yearn for, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers –style). In glorious precision, Pierce elicits every gazer's smiles As lovably and nimbly as he did when he played Frasier 's Niles. Pirates! The Penzance Musical | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus The modern world is full of stress, so go and have a party, brah, And shake it like a necklace made of gaudy beads at Mardi Gras. Enjoy this Broadway hybrid that is tuneful and poetical: A most delightful model of a modern operettical. Pirates! The Penzance Musical. Todd Haimes Theatre (Broadway). Music by Arthur Sullivan. Libretto by W.S. Gilbert. Adapted by Rupert Holmes. Directed by Scott Ellis. With David Hyde Pierce, Ramin Karimloo, Nicholas Barasch, Jinkx Monsoon, Samantha Williams, Preston Truman Boyd. Running time: 2hrs 30mins. One intermission. Post scriptum: These rhymes of mine, I grant you, may not all be perfect, but they were The best that I could do—and face it, standards are not what they were. I'm just a humble swimmer in this lyrical aquarium; If W.S. Gilbert's what you want, then go unbury him.
Chicago Tribune
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: ‘Pirates! The Penzance Musical' is a delightful bit of Gilbert and Sullivan, back on Broadway
NEW YORK — W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan's 'The Pirates of Penzance' is a foundational musical. First seen in New York in 1879, this wacky yarn of swashbuckling pirates, Monty Pythonesque coppers and the comely daughters of a naval major general taught a young Broadway how to structure a musical comedy. Sitting at the Todd Haimes Theatre and listening to a character named Mabel warble a ditty called 'Ah, Leave Me Not to Pine Alone,' I was suddenly struck by how similar the song was to 'Alone At A Drive-In Movie' from 'Grease.' Sensibilities have changed, of course, since 1879. And since Gilbert and Sullivan helpfully reside in the public domain, they can be adapted with impunity. In this latest case, now a relatively rare outing for the pair on Broadway with the Roundabout Theatre Company, they've been given an overhaul by adapter Rupert Holmes and a new sexed-up title, being as producers these days panic whenever a title lacks a 'banger,' as we say in journalism. Ergo, the doings of the Cornish buccaneers now goes by 'Pirates! The Penzance Musical,' as if Gilbert and Sullivan had given a damn about that particular town, beyond its alliterative properties. At least they'd have appreciated the commercial practicalities. As they would Holmes' decision to juice up the 'Pirates' score with songs actually written for 'Iolanthe,' 'The Mikado,' and 'H.M.S. Pinafore.' Why not? That's been done with Cole Porter and George Gershwin and we won't be seeing 'The Mikado' anytime soon. Naturally, 'Pirates' has a star in David Hyde Pierce. The good news is that said celebrity is fully equal to the formidable performative demands of one of the greatest patter songs of all time, 'I Am the Very Model of the Modern Major-General,' which he performed flawlessly, and ever more rapidly, on the night I was there. Hyde Piece is perfect for Gilbert and Sullivan: he's droll, a tad dotty, curiously understated and generous with fellow actors, and there is a perpetual twinkle in his been-there-done-that eyes. Add a handle-bar mustache, and what more do you need? Ramin Karimloo, the dubious pirate monarch, certainly adds to the party. Half Kevin Kline and half Hugh Jackman, the bare-chested Karimloo swaggers around as the fun demands alongside Frederic (Nicholas Barasch), the duty-bound young fellow apprenticed to the pirates and whose complications and affection for Mabel (Samantha Williams) inform most of the plot. Barasch looks and acts like the long-lost child of Conan O'Brien; he's funny too, in the straight-man kind of way that Gilbert and Sullivan demands. Frederic has to fight off the machinations of his guardian Ruth, who is spiced up a tad by Jinkx Monsoon, a shrewd bit of casting that I suspect was intended to make that whole relationship more fun and, well, a little less creepy. The director, Scott Ellis, is clever with those kinds of choices (Preston Truman Boyd is well cast as the police sergeant) and Ellis is joined here by choreographer Warren Carlyle, who keeps all of these wacky characters on their toes, including the show's famous Chaplinesque constables, here rendered as the New Orleans Volunteer Police, since the whole show now takes place in New Orleans in 1880 with a Creole kinda vibe and new syncopations added to the score. My one caveat on what is a highly entertaining and most genial evening of daffy, escapist Broadway, is that some of it feels a bit much, especially movement and new orchestrations-wise. Gilbert's internal rhymes were never equalled until Stephen Sondheim came along with comparable talent and there are times when the puns and quips get a tad overwhelmed by the Monty Python walks, the jazzy stylings and what not. Occasionally, the material needed to be better trusted. But those are minor caveats. Holmes, best known for writing 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood,' gives the show a fresh and loving applied coat of paint, even writing Gilbert and Sullivan themselves into the experience, taking a leaf from Jamie Lloyd's little homage to Andrew Lloyd Webber in the current 'Sunset Blvd.' But Ellis also has delivered an old-school analog pleasure in a Broadway season much seduced by digital temptation. In their graves, Gilbert and Sullivan must be turning topsy-turvy with delight.
New York Times
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: Gilbert and Sullivan's ‘Pirates,' Now in Jazzy New Orleans
W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, the operetta kings of 19th-century Britain, had a hit in America with 'H.M.S. Pinafore,' but they reaped no American fortune from it. Instead, lacking U.S. copyright protection, their glorious piffle spread in the States like spring colds, causing fits of laughter but returning no royalties. By the time the team from London arrived in Manhattan in late 1878, bringing the real thing with them, 15 pirate productions were already running. Is it any wonder that their next operetta, in 1879, was called, with a wink, 'The Pirates of Penzance'? And that they opened it in New York instead of London to avoid the financial fate of 'Pinafore'? Gilbert and Sullivan were sharp satirists but also savvy businessmen. More than any of their 13 other so-called Savoy operas, 'Pirates' has borne that out, returning to Broadway regularly ever since. (The Public Theater's 1981 revival, starring Kevin Kline and Linda Ronstadt, ran longer than any previous production anywhere.) For a work so old, in such a seemingly passé genre, whose touchstones and targets are literally Victorian, that's astonishing: a tribute to the resilience of Gilbert's words, the delight of Sullivan's music and our willingness to make common cause with the past. Though jolly enough, the latest Broadway incarnation, which opened on Thursday at the Todd Haimes Theater, trusts neither the material nor us as much as it might. Clumsily but accurately retitled 'Pirates! The Penzance Musical,' and transported to post-Reconstruction New Orleans, it is also significantly altered in tone. Except for the central performance by David Hyde Pierce, marvelously underplaying the tongue-twisting Major-General, the production has a sweaty quality, bordering on frenzy, that's hopelessly at odds with the cool wit of the original. Perhaps the sweat is a nod to the story's steamy new location, or a sign of the effort it took to get it there. As adapted by Rupert Holmes, and directed by Scott Ellis, 'Pirates' now takes place in a French Quarter theater — a clever touch, given Louisiana's historic proximity to actual piracy, but one that requires laborious workarounds and, apparently, an uplifting lesson. Piffle is better light than heavy, and preferably without a moral. Indeed, there is something essentially dry about the original operetta, whose tricky, twitty humor marks the beginning of a line that extends to Monty Python and beyond. The pirates score no plunder because their king (Ramin Karimloo) is sentimental about orphans, being one himself, and 'word has gotten around.' (Their intended victims are all mysteriously parentless.) The craven police are less than heartened when Mabel (Samantha Williams), the comeliest of the Major-General's daughters, sings them rousingly into battle: 'Go ye heroes, go and die!' Such nonsense isn't just decorative, it's structural, turning the plot. As a child, Frederic (Nicholas Barasch) was supposed to be apprenticed to a pilot until his 21st birthday, but his nurse, Ruth (Jinkx Monsoon), misheard the instruction, apprenticing him instead to a pirate. Years later, on the last day of his indenture, anticipating his marriage to Mabel, he receives bad news from the jealous Ruth. Having been born, she says, in a leap year, on Feb. 29, he has celebrated only five birthdays. A self-described slave to duty, he resolves to remain with the pirates as specified, asking Mabel if she'd mind waiting the 60-some years to wed him. 'It seems so long,' she sings. Those jokes still work, but not everything survives the long journey from the original setting on the sleepy Cornwall coast. In particular, Gilbert's primary satire, of the English gentry, is unsalvageable. Only in Britain could his resolution make sense, when it is revealed that the pirates are 'all noblemen who have gone wrong': 'With all their faults, they love their queen.' Instead, taking cues from the Creole culture of New Orleans, Holmes steers the plot toward an uplifting if unconvincing new finale invoking the idea of America as 'a patchwork, scratchwork nation' of immigrants. That nifty phrase notwithstanding, his lyrics, supplanting perhaps half the originals, are rarely as neat and thus rarely as funny as Gilbert's. Sullivan fares better. Though his style is typically formal and foursquare — we get a hit of his hymn 'Onward, Christian Soldiers' at the start — music is inherently more flexible than words. Flexible enough to make Sullivan swing, though? Well, yes. The heavy rejiggering of the 'Pirates' songs (as well as borrowings from 'Pinafore,' 'The Mikado' and 'Iolanthe') has been exceptionally well managed to honor the city's melting pot of influences. Scents of jazz, blues, Dixieland, boogie-woogie, soft-shoe, calypso, rag and rumba waft by in catchy new arrangements. (The music director is Joseph Joubert; he and Daryl Waters devised the orchestrations.) I was too sonically satisfied to mind the unlikeliness, in a quasi-classical work, of a finale featuring an orchestra of washboards. It is not a non sequitur to mention here Karimloo's athletic performance, hanging off a galleon and leaping over barrels (sets by David Rockwell) in abs-baring costumes by Linda Cho. Monsoon's Ruth, enhanced with an unnecessary second-act number from 'The Mikado,' is more saloon wench than nursemaid, but her turn is rowdy camp fun nonetheless. Williams's Mabel is as fetching and beamish as Donald Holder's colorful lighting, and the ensemble, especially when performing Warren Carlyle's choreography, is very hard-working. That's fine, if not very operetta. I wish Ellis's direction had taken more direction from Pierce's pickled deadpan; with his absurd facial hair (by Charles G. LaPointe) and rum-blossom nose, he needs little else to get his laughs. Really, the less he does the funnier it is, because his stillness helps us focus on the words, which are otherwise too often difficult to discern in this production. For once, that can't be blamed on the sound design, which Mikaal Sulaiman has mercifully kept at moderate volume. The problem is that the musical-theater style of the adaptation is not ideally suited to the density of Gilbert's verse. Despite such mismatches between the original and the remake, 'Pirates!' is still a feather in the tricorn of the Roundabout Theater Company, which produced and nurtured it. Operettas don't last 146 years just because they're good. (I love Gilbert and Sullivan's 'Ruddigore' too, but have never seen it except at camp.) Longevity like that requires faith not only in the past but also in the future. So if 'Pirates!' finds a forever home, or even just a temporary one, in New Orleans — celebrating 'the land of the clean slate, the blank canvas, the new beginning,' as the Major-General declares in his new peroration — so be it. Even those savvy Savoyards might approve.
New York Post
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
‘Pirates! The Penzance Musical' review: Hilarious high-seas hijinks with David Hyde Pierce
Theater review PIRATES! THE PENZANCE MUSICAL The title of 'Pirates! The Penzance Musical' is a loony one. What, exactly, is a Penzance musical? Don't give this sugar-coated, smile-a-second Broadway show the hook so fast, though. The only grunted 'arrrgh's come from the stage. Advertisement The slaphappy, reworked revival of 'The Pirates of Penzance,' which opened Thursday night at the Todd Haimes Theatre, has nothing to do with the coast of England. It shifts the absurd action some 2,800 nautical miles west to New Orleans, Louisiana. Leaving 'Penzance' on the marquee, I suppose, serves to remind audiences they're not seeing 'Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides — The Musical' or 'Captain Phillips Live!'. They're getting the same favorite old Gilbert and Sullivan songs, just with a French Quarter twist. The continental leap dusts off the 145-year-old operetta and gives it an energetic oomph of swing and ragtime music, and the stage is brightened up by hot-sauce pops of purple, yellow and fiery red. Advertisement Director Scott Ellis' boisterous romp is not groundbreaking in the way the Joseph Papp-produced 1980 revival was, but it has the same irreverent spirit — and perpetually ridiculous tale. 4 Nicholas Barasch, Ramin Karimloo and Jinkx Monsoon star in 'Pirates! The Penzance Musical' on Broadway. Joan Marcus There's naive pirate apprentice Frederic (Nicholas Barasch), who turns 21 (or so he thinks), only to learn that his lifetime of slavish duty to the seafaring rogues was the result of an administrative error. Years earlier, weird Ruth (Jinkx Monsoon), the only woman he's ever met, accidentally mistook Fred's dad saying 'pilot' for 'pirate.' Whoops. Advertisement His cronies, and later enemies, are the ship full of clumsy adult 'orphans,' led by the swaggering Pirate King (Ramin Karimloo). Loud and easily fooled, they are far from the world's best swashbucklers. And the pinky-out Major General (David Hyde Pierce) and his young daughters — including Mabel (Samantha Williams) — have Fredric's eyes bulging out of his head, and wedding bells clanging in his ears. 4 David Hyde Pierce is especially hilarious as the Major General. Joan Marcus The plot, however, is beside the point, which is why this material can stand up to pretty much any staging so long as the performers can sing the hell out of it and sell a punchline. Advertisement All of them can. Especially wonderful is Hyde Pierce's doddering 'I am the very model of a modern' Major General. He's Niles Crane if he retired to the Villages in Florida. His signature tune, the show's most famous, is wisely untouched by the creative team. And it kills. Not so uppercrust — crusty maybe — is 'RuPaul's Drag Race' star Monsoon's lovesick Ruth. She chews the scenery in just the way you want her to. Monsoon's 'When Fredrick Was A Little Lad' performed on a spinning piano is Lucy and Ethel at the chocolate factory. 4 Bararach, who falls for Samatha Williams' Mabel, has evolved into a formidable romantic lead. Joan Marcus Barasch, who's so often played the quirky sidekick, has become a winning romantic lead. His Frederic is innocent and lovable, and importantly not an airhead. And Karimloo, while not the funniest King ever, looks the part swinging from a rope and booms the tunes like canon fire. And now, some quibbles quaint. I'm no purist, but there are a couple changes from Ellis and adapter Rupert Holmes that don't sail as well as others. Many lyrics have been updated, which is fine. Not so digestible is that they've crammed in a treasure chest of unnecessary backstory to Karimloo's otherwise rousing 'I Am The Pirate King!' that makes it overcomplicated and hard to follow. And the duo have also tacked on two songs from Gilbert and Sullivan's 'HMS Pinafore.' One of those, 'We Sail the Ocean Blue,' at the end of the first act is a brilliant addition that sends the audience into intermission on a high. Advertisement 4 'Pirates!' is full of humor and frivolity. Joan Marcus The other, the out-of-nowhere finale, misguidedly turns 'For He Is An Englishman' into the heavy-handed 'We're All From Someplace Else.' Searching for an important message in 'The Pirates of Penzance' is like trying to find the lost city of Atlantis. Never gonna happen. Just have a wedding and dance a dance. Advertisement But what's two minutes in a musical that's otherwise effervescent, gorgeously sung, hysterical and frivolous? These days on Broadway, that is, that is a glorious thing.
