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Stage Review: 'Pajama Game's' romp heats up Benedum stage
Thursday, July 20, 2000 By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Critic
Fireworks is the last thing you expect. "The Pajama Game" is an old-fashioned musical comedy that bubbles over with what we like to remember as the innocence of the 1950s. A saturated Technicolor slice of small-town Americana, it's rich in the comedy of ordinary lives embroiled in cartoon conflict, swathed in the ample folds of about nine (by my count) jaunty, memorable songs.
That's what I was looking forward to, anyway -- partly because this is a show from my youth and thus golden in memory, but also because it is stuffed to the gills with genuine period charm. And that's what the CLO delivers.
But there is something more. Fireworks turn out to be the last thing you do get -- literally.
The show's final number is the triumphant comic love ballad "There Once Was a Man," in which Sid Sorokin and Babe Williams celebrate their zestful love, and stars Robert Cuccioli and Beth Leavel sizzle with the incandescent fun that marks performances as very special indeed. Act 2 begins with the famous and seminal Bob Fosse dance number "Steam Heat," with its imperative "Get hot!"
To bring "Pajama Game" to its rousing conclusion, Cuccioli and Leavel do.
What makes the song so wonderful is the excitement of two characters -- and two performers, too -- taking imaginative, visceral, giddy pleasure in their own shared moment. Charisma and sexy fun dance along their bodies like lightning. You can hear the crackle and feel the heat.
In retrospect, this final moment is fated all along, so strong is the chemistry between these two. Cuccioli, best-known as the dual star of "Jekyll & Hyde," is a throwback to the robust, handsome, warm-voiced heroes of the John Raitt school: His "Hey There" duet with himself lets you immediately feel his strength. Leavel is a willowy comedian, so funny and smart you may not first notice her beauty.
Usually, I would think, revivals of "Pajama Game" get by mainly on their comic leads. CLO director Richard Sabellico has gathered strengths there, too, led by Ray DeMattis as Hines, the lovably psychotic time-study man; Jane Lanier as Gladys, his ditsy inamorata; and Georgia Engel as Mabel, the eccentric secretary.
DeMattis gets the show off to a great start with "Racing With the Clock" and the title song, which add up to as good an introduction to the comic agenda as the more famous "Comedy Tonight" is to "Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum."
Then he joins Engel in the vaudeville-inspired "I'll Never Be Jealous Again," complete with artfully diffident softshoe.
Lanier starts out under wraps, as though not quite sure of Gladys' character, but as she gets her chance to unlimber her simultaneously perky and sinuous dancing in "Her Is!" and especially "Steam Heat," the recent headliner in "Fosse" warms to the acting side of the job, too.
By "Hernando's Hideaway," you see why this role originally commanded the skills of Carol Haney and helped make a star of Shirley MacLaine.
Engel's strength is her breathy abstraction, comic in its offhandedness. In rising to the major character part of Prez, CLO regular Jeff Howell makes his foibles palatable and scores big on his songs. Gene Saraceni plays the management heavy, Patricia Phillips is a feisty Mae, Lisa McMillan a commanding Brenda, and Ted Brunetti a sweet Pop.
Sabellico and choreographer Liza Gennaro give a youthful and lively ensemble plenty to do, even though occasionally (in "Once a Year Day") the action doesn't dovetail tightly. The rented sets and costumes are colorful -- the sets are a particularly beguiling essay in retro Midwestern art deco.
For all its '50s innocence, "Pajama Game" touches on some issues that grew more serious in the decades since -- mainly, feminism and workers' rights. But the genius of the piece is to make the union leader a fool in partial balance to the chicanery of the company boss, so whatever your labor politics, you are happy to celebrate the love match at the end.
And what a match!
Why has it been 32 years since the CLO gave us this choice delight?
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Where: Pittsburgh CLO at Benedum Center, Downtown