Stompin' Smash

Fats city on Broadway

Music everywhere, feet are pattin', Puttin 'tempo in old Manhattan.

Everybody is out high-hattin', Spreadin 'rhythm around.

To most people, those are the lyrics of a 1935 Fats Waller song, Spreadin' Rhythm Around. But to audiences at Broadway's Longacre Theater, they are official marching orders, a direct command from the feet to the brain. Not since Fats was tapping the keys back in speakeasy days has old Manhattan had such a good high-hattin' time as it does in Ain 't Misbehavin', a musical collection of 30 songs Waller composed or helped to make famous. To put it mildly, Ain't Misbehavin ' is behaving wildly. Three days after it opened May 9, it was sold out through June; now the house is booked into September. And besides picking up five Tony Award nominations, the show won the New York Drama Critics Award as the year's best musical, against such high-powered competition as Liza Minnelli's The Act and Bob Fosse's Dancin'.

Like other recent Broadway hits, including A Chorus Line and Runaways, Ain't Misbehavin' started out in the hinterlands--in its case, a cramped boite (seating 65) in the Manhattan Theater Club. But from the first, Director Richard Maltby Jr., 40, the Yaleman who put Ain't Misbehavin' together, believed that what he had was not just a little revue but a big Broadway show, cut down to cabaret size. Sure enough, he recalls, "after the first three nights, I told the cast they'd better get ready for something really big. In fact, we had trouble containing the show in a cabaret. This cast can blow the walls down even at the Longacre."

The Joshua of the cast, which consists of three women and two men, is Nell Carter. Her remarkable voice can be as powerful as a trumpet and as plaintive as a flute, and when she sings Mean To Me and It's a Sin To Tell a Lie, she is like a whole orchestra. Her fellow performers --Armelia McQueen, Ken Page, Andre

De Shields, Charlaine Woodard--are equally superb. Indeed, the funniest song in the show is Ken Page's Your Feet's Too Big. Sitting alone with a glass of booze at a cafe table, Page yells out at his absent woman, "From your ankles up, I'll say you sure are sweet./ But from there down, baby, there's just too much feet." By the time he gets to the reprise, every foot in the theater is stomping: "Don't want you 'cause your feet's too big./ Can't use you 'cause your feet's too big./ I really hate you 'cause your feet's too big."

Though they seem to have been singing Fats' songs all their lives, most of the performers knew little about him. When they began rehearsals, they watched old Waller film clips to get in the proper mood. Maltby, the son of Music Arranger Richard Maltby, knew nothing of Fats before his friend and associate director Murray Horwitz suggested building a show around Waller's work. They both soon discovered, as Maltby told TIME'S Janice Castro, that "nobody wedded comedy and music the way Fats did. He is always playing little jokes on the side, and you can't help but laugh."

The cast learned 50 songs and then tried them out in different combinations to see who sang them best. "We were trying to fit the right song to the right personality," says De Shields.

The transition from a small cabaret to a 1,000-seat Broadway theater might have been fatal, but Maltby and his cast handled it with ease. The set, a mostly bare Harlem saloon, was designed to make the stage seem smaller. There is a six-piece band in the background, and Piano Player Luther Henderson--the unspeaking Fats figure in the show--bangs away at an old upright job off to one side with his back to the audience. But the action is focused on front center, where the singers are, so that it almost spills into the first rows. "We had to break down the barriers that often exist between audience and cast," explains Maltby. "I wanted the performers to pull the audience right into the show."

The major difference between cabaret and Broadway is not in the show or in the performers, but in the people out front. "It's a hotter audience on Broadway," says De Shields. "Everybody is on this trip. A lot of people just like to sit with their hands clasped and their eyes closed, seraphic like. Then there are the people who hear the rhythm in every song and who clap, stomp and sing along."

That rhythm will be around for some time. A road show will take it outside New York, and several movie companies are discussing film rights; RCA Records will have a cast album out soon. Maltby expects Waller's music to be revived as Scott Joplin's was after the 1973 movie The Sting. "Waller was a national resource!" he exclaims. "He grabbed an armful of life in an exhilarating way, and I want people everywhere to feel that exalting spirit." Or as Waller would put it, that old high-hattin' feeling.

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