BRING IN 'DA TUNESMITHS

By Richard Zoglin

Times Square may be in the midst of a makeover, but on Broadway change comes slowly. A year after Rent was supposed to have revolutionized the Broadway musical, the Great White Way scarcely seems to have noticed. Nearly all this season's big musicals are arriving, as usual, in the last two frantic weeks before the Tony Award nominations. And far from showcasing a new generation of downtown talents, like Rent's Jonathan Larson or Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk's Savion Glover, this season could pass for a Friars Club reunion of old Broadway tunesmiths, with Cy Coleman (Sweet Charity), John Kander and Fred Ebb (Cabaret), Maury Yeston (Nine) and Leslie Bricusse (Stop the World--I Want to Get Off) all back on the boards.

It even looked as if this season would bring another of those old-fashioned megabudget bombs of Broadway legend. What else could one expect from a $10 million musical called Titanic, based on everybody's favorite sea disaster and seemingly headed for a similar catastrophe, after some well-publicized technical problems (the ship had a bit of trouble sinking) during previews?

But Titanic, it turns out, is no disaster, just an uninspired shipboard melodrama with watery songs, predictable musings about the hubris of the enterprise, and a surfeit of cliched characters. They include the ship's craven owner, who keeps urging the captain to increase the speed; aristocrats like the John Jacob Astors and the Isidor Strauses, who drown with dignity; and some tiresomely idealistic Irish immigrants in steerage. What director Richard Jones and scenic designer Stewart Laing have accomplished, however, is an imaginative, even haunting, stage rendering of the sinking: the stage tilts ominously; faces of the doomed passengers appear at portholes like apparitions. Titanic's Broadway voyage will almost surely have a quick end, but its creators, like the shipbuilders, at least dreamed big.

Steel Pier, by contrast, has been carried to Broadway by far more favorable winds. It has a score by Kander and Ebb--once again toasts of the town, thanks to the hit revival of their 1975 show, Chicago--and a premise that seems made to order for the team and for talented choreographer Susan Stroman: a 1930s dance marathon in Atlantic City. The show is cannily mounted, bouncy and often tuneful, professional all the way. Yet it's still a disappointment.

One problem is David Thompson's book, with its tired cocktail of characters left over from They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, and an odd Twilight Zone chaser. Karen Ziemba combines Broadway pizazz with shy-girl vulnerability as a contestant who partners a stunt pilot (Daniel McDonald) but is secretly married to the marathon's slimy emcee (Gregory Harrison). The mix of nostalgia, cynicism and period artifice, however, keeps us at arm's length from the material (beware of any show in which one character calls another "Flyboy"). The ersatz-'30s numbers are pleasant but forgettable, although Debra Monk, as a marathon veteran, puts across a saucy showstopper, Everybody's Girl. Mostly, however, Steel Pier just seems tinny.

So where is Broadway to find its next long-running musical smash? This season's sleeper could be Jekyll & Hyde, a high-minded, Les Miz-style show based on the classic horror tale, which has been touring the country (and having its songs recorded) for a couple of years. But head of the class among the new arrivals is The Life, a dark, brashly entertaining musical about the seedy denizens of Times Square circa 1980, from composer Cy Coleman and lyricist Ira Gasman. It is, moreover, one new musical that really shows the impact of Rent. The Life has had its sights set on Broadway for years, but might never have arrived if Rent had not made gritty New York street life safe for middlebrow theatergoers.

The Life is far from perfect. While startlingly raw for Broadway (the hookers are grungy, fleshy and foul-mouthed), the milieu will seem old hat to anyone who has seen, say, an episode of NYPD Blue, and the melodrama is often heavy-handed. What transforms the show is Coleman's vital, jazzy score--his best since Sweet Charity--and Michael Blakemore's crisp, less-is-more staging. The show starts out in high gear with an infectiously cynical ode to self-interest (Use What You Got), sung by hustler-narrator Jojo (the excellent Sam Harris), and keeps topping itself. Lillias White, as an over-the-hill hooker, brings vivacity and soul to Gasman's clever lyrics ("I'm getting too old/ For the oldest profession"), and the driving, up-tempo number Why Don't They Leave Us Alone turns the hookers and pimps into the most inspired chorus line in town. The Life may, in truth, be just another kind of Broadway hustle, but when the con men are as slick as these, you drop your money with a smile.