I’M pleased to report that a musical-comedy star is born in the newly revived “Pal Joey.”
Unfortunately for the Roundabout, it’s Martha Plimpton and not Matthew Risch, the chorus boy recently bumped up to the title role.
As the tough-talking, second-rate nightclub performer Gladys Bumps, Plimpton – not exactly known for musical comedy – is terrific, the standout attraction of the flawed revival that opened last night.
Risch stepped into the lead when Tony winner Christian Hoff withdrew after a foot injury. (At least, that’s the official version.) And while it would have been fun if the story had a happy ending a la Shirley MacLaine’s burst into stardom in “The Pajama Game,” Risch is no Shirley MacLaine.
While he’s a strong dancer and a fair singer, he doesn’t yet have the acting chops and, more important, the charisma to make his Joey as much of a charmer as he is a heel. One can only imagine what Harry Connick Jr. or Hugh Jackman, both rumored for the role in recent years, would have been like.
Working with a new book by Richard Greenberg (which differs only slightly from John O’Hara’s original, while making one of the characters blatantly gay), director Joe Mantello has provided a smooth, reasonably entertaining staging that’s enhanced by the slinky, sexy choreography of Graciela Daniele.
Stockard Channing, looking impossibly young for her 64 years, is compelling as the sexually rapacious socialite Vera Simpson, even if her renditions of such classic songs as “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” are better acted than sung.
As the innocent love interest who is taken in by Joey’s charm, Jenny Fellner sings well but is rather bland.
This 1930s Chicago-set musical depicting its amoral title character’s machinations to open his own nightclub never really packs the punch that it should.
Despite some terrific elements, including Paul Gemignani’s typically expert musical direction and William Ivey Long’s gorgeous period costumes (only Scott Pask’s set design, featuring looming elevated railways tracks and a giant spiral staircase, doesn’t really work), this “Pal Joey” is seriously undercut by the gaping hole at its center.
PAL JOEY Studio 54, 254 W. 54th St.; 212-719-1300. Through Feb. 15.