Heel's Angel
By T.E.K.
PAL JOEY
Music by RICHARD RODGERS Lyrics by LORENZ HART Book by JOHN O'HARA
Some shows have such vividly defined personalities that they defy any flaws in production. Pal Joey is that kind of show. This revival at Manhattan's Circle in the Square/Joseph E. Levine Theater certainly has its flaws; yet it remains an irresistible delight with enormous verve, raffish insouciance and a musk of cynicism that somehow has the allure of perfume.
The Rodgers and Hart score, one of the most felicitous of their remarkable partnership, plays an undeniable role in the success of the evening. Songs like Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, I Could Write a Book and Zip belong in the U.S. musical theater's hall of fame.
Hart's lyrics were seldom brisker or more uninhibited and Rodgers' tunes were rarely suaver or wittier.
Brechtian Book. Still, in this disastrous season for musicals, the lesson of Pal Joey is clear -- the book's the thing.
Musical comedies ignore that fact at their peril. John O'Hara's book has the spine of a skyscraper, with big-city sleaziness reflected in every panel of the glass-curtain wall. This is a Brechtian book in which a small-time heel, Joey (Christopher Chadman), with his naive boasts and shameless buttering-up, is letched onto by a rich, man-eating tigress named Vera (Joan Copeland), who loves him enough to stake him to a night club, but who coolly leaves him before he can leave her.
Copeland seems to sing with her loins and if Western Union ever puts out a Lustogram, it should hire her to deliver it. Chadman is pallid as Joey, rather like a gypsy dropped from the audition of A Chorus Line. His dancing, however, is always fluent, and the actual chorus line, under Margo Sappington's supple control, both creates and burlesques a raft of dance routines. Mingling sordid facts with lovely tunes, Pal Joey is a modern Beggar 's Opera richly adorned in the apparel of a prince's ransom.
T.E.K.
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