Strike Up the Band!

By RICHARD CORLISS

In a fourth-floor rehearsal room at Manhattan's City Center, the cast of St. Louis Woman has gathered to run through the first act of the 1946 Harold Arlen-Johnny Mercer musical. "Lord knows what happens next!" bellows Chuck Cooper, a Tony Award-winning actor from The Life. What happens next is a little theater magic. Vanessa Williams enters, slithers onto a straight-backed chair and sings Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home. This tune is a taunt, a turf marking and a declaration of sexual independence in 32 bars. And with Williams, a young star of CDs, movies and TV, cooing it, the number is also a warning to those who ignore the shining legacy and dogged vitality of the American musical theater: baby, you don't know what you're missing.

On Broadway, which has two big new hits (Ragtime and The Lion King) and is headed for its highest-grossing season ever, the musical is doing O.K. But for genuine, up-to-date, classic Broadway, true believers flock each spring to City Center for three new enthralling installments (of only five performances each) in the Encores! series. Now in its fifth season under executive director Judith Daykin, Encores! has spawned a Broadway hit (Chicago) and inspired concert programs in Los Angeles and Washington.

The tradition of concert revivals--in which the principals wear evening clothes and hold the show's script in their hands, and a full orchestra saws away at the original orchestrations--is a distinguished one. Jerome Kern's 1985 centenary cued half a dozen glittery restorations. In London an ambitious series called Discover the Lost Musicals has flourished since 1988. The same year, Daykin produced concert versions of two Gershwin musicals, as well as an all-star tribute that featured a gnomic rendition of Soon by Bob Dylan. ("Did he hit even one right note?" Daykin asks today.) When she came to City Center in 1992, she brought the concert-revival idea with her.

The '98 season, which has included a brisk Li'l Abner and a triumphant version of the Gershwins' Strike Up the Band that deserves to go straight to Broadway, concludes this week with Williams and Charles S. Dutton in St. Louis Woman.

A concert revival of a Broadway show? Easy enough--just get the sheet music, assemble an orchestra and cast, and start playing. Well, no. A 17th century Monteverdi opera has cleaner, fuller charts than many an old Broadway hit, whose arrangements might have ended up in the garage or garbage. The parts for the Kern-Oscar Hammerstein II Sweet Adeline, which was performed outdoors, had dead mosquitoes stuck to the pages. Says Daykin: "The musicians didn't know if it was a note or a dead bug."

To reassemble an old musical needs a mix of showmanship and scholarship--a paleontologist's digging and Poirot's powers of inference. "Did they use this harmony, or did they mean it to be that harmony?" says Rob Fisher, 45, the series' musical director and local hero. "I agonize over this, because I want the score to sound exactly as it did originally." No reclamation project has been as daunting as that of St. Louis Woman. "There was no score," Fisher says, "just scraps of material." Ace orchestrators Ralph Burns and Luther Henderson re-created--and, for the overture and dance numbers, were obliged to create--the musical settings. Topflight actor-singers signed on. And in a fortnight flat, from first rehearsal to closing night, the show goes on--and off.

The series also testifies to the stream of musical performers who haven't heard the form is dead. Why isn't there a new show each year for Martin Short, who wowed Encores! audiences in Burt Bacharach's Promises, Promises? Occasionally a supreme thrush like Judy Kuhn, Judy Kaye, Rebecca Luker, Faith Prince, Debbie Gravitte or Kristin Chenoweth gets a cushy job on Broadway, but few new shows give these beguilers a chance to wrap their pipes around classic pop. Encores! does (though it pays just $700 a week for stars and chorus boys alike). "I love the concept," says Williams. "It doesn't have to be a formula hit, and it doesn't run for three years. You can take a risk."

Some of the shows have been commemorated on CD (not good enough--they all must be preserved!), but the magic moments occur in those long weekends onstage. A few to recall with a shivery thrill: the giddy glissandi of the Sing for Your Supper trio (Luker, Gravitte and Sarah Uriarte Berry) from The Boys from Syracuse; Kuhn, an angel lost in hell, singing The Man I Love from Strike Up the Band; the male chorale Some Girl Is on His Mind from Sweet Adeline--a rendition so pure and poignant that it left the City Center crowd in silent rapture.

Will there be such a moment in St. Louis Woman? Perhaps--when Williams sings the show's one standard, Come Rain or Come Shine. Then Broadway's most knowledgeable audience will shout, "Encores!"

--Reported by Elaine Rivera/New York

With reporting by ELAINE RIVERA/NEW YORK