Musical Theatre West opens its 2024 season with just about as surefire a crowd-pleaser as 20th-century Broadway has to offer, the screen-to-stage classic 42nd Street.

It took forty-seven years for Busby Berkeley’s 1933 Warner Brothers black-and-white classic to make its 1980 stage debut with a considerably revised book by Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble and brand-new choreography by the legendary Gower Champion, and it’s this original iteration rather than the more frequently staged 2001 Broadway revival version that MTW audiences now get to savor.

The show’s “Greatest Hits” overture has only just concluded when the curtain rises just high enough to reveal several dozen legs tap-dancing as if their careers depended on it … and as any Broadway buff will tell you, the avenue you’re being taken to is naughty, gaudy, bawdy, sporty, 42nd Street.

Emma Nossal stars as Peggy Sawyer, freshly arrived in Manhattan from Allentown, PA with nothing but a suitcase full of dreams, a lucky yellow scarf, and a big bundle of talent.

Though popular male ingénue Billy Lawlor (Quintan Craig) is immediately taken with Peggy, a (literal) run-in with famed Broadway director Julian (Robert Mammana) does not put the would-be star in the director’s good graces, nor is egomaniacal diva Dorothy Brock (April Nixon) likely to be charmed by a singer-actress who can actually cut a rug.

(Double-threat Dorothy’s “dance talents” are restricted to graceful arm movements while bona fide hoofers do their complex choreography around her.)

As any 42nd Street aficionado can tell you, a bit of bad luck for Dorothy provides Peggy with the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become an overnight Broadway star in Julian’s Pretty Lady—if only she can master 25 pages, 6 songs and 10 dance numbers and thereby “save the show,” all within 36 hours.

No one need doubt the outcome of this prodigious endeavor (this being musical comedy after all), and many in the audience will be able to mouth along with Julian the classic words, “You’re going out there a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star!”

Featuring one Harry Warren-Al Dubin song smash after another, Stewart and Bramble’s clever book, and choreographer Cheryl Baxter’s recreating Champion’s original Broadway dance step to dazzling effect (with some personal touches of her own), 42nd Street delivers the entertainment goods, and then some, including more show-stopping dance numbers than have probably ever been put in a single Broadway musical, “Shadow Waltz,” “Getting Out Of Town,” “Dames,” “We’re In The Money,” “Lullaby Of Broadway,” and the title song among them.

Director Cynthia Ferrer makes it three MTW winners in a row (following Damn Yankees and 9 To 5) with about as terrifically staged and acted 42nd Street as anyone could wish for.

Mammana has precisely the 1930s leading man charisma to make for a Julian Marsh as commanding as he is appealing; the divine Nixon humanizes the formidable Dorothy and sings with such smoky, sultry pipes, you may feel you’re hearing “You’re Getting To Be A Habit With Me” and “I Know Now” for the very first time; and star turns don’t get any more tap-sational than Nossal’s perky, luminescent Peggy.

Graduating from MTW ensemble staple to young leading man, Craig’s golden-piped, fancy-footed Billy is a bona fide tenor-next-door charmer, and Bree Murphy and Jamie Torcellini steal scenes left and right as song-writing duo Maggie Jones and Bert Barry.

Jane Papageorge is a red-headed firecracker as “Anywhere Annie” Reilley, ably supported by chorus girl besties April Lovejoy as Lorraine and Maggie Ek as Phyllis.

Phillip Attmore taps like nobody’s business as show-within-a-show choreographer Andy Lee, with Kevin Carolan (Abner Dillon), Stephen Bishop (Pat Denning), and Ricky Bulda (Mac, Doc, Thug) completing the principal cast to engaging effect.

Ensemble hoofers John Paul Batista, Johnisa Breault, Ryan Cody, Ellie Cook, Erin Dubreuil, Jonathan Blake Flemings, Kurt Kemper, Missy Marion, Evan Martorana, Marisa Moenho, Noelle Roth, Grace Simmons, Cole Sisser, and Helen Tait make for the most indefatigable of tap stars, their ranks amplified by student ensemble members Olivia Liddi, Makaela McCosar, Ariel Tello, Elizabeth Weber, Emma Rose Williams, and Sophia Grace Williams.

Bruce Brockman’s sets are more bus-and-truck than Broadway but that hardly matters with costume designer Debbie Roberts filling the stage with one gorgeously colorful 1930s creation after another (both designs are Music Theatre Wichita rentals) and Paul Black making the period apparel look even more glorious with his dazzling lighting design.

42nd Street sounds sensational too thanks to musical director Wilkie Ferguson, his Broadway-caliber pit orchestra, and sound designer Julie Ferrin mixing it all to perfection.

Additional design kudos are shared by Melanie Cavaness and Gretchen Morales (properties), Anthony Gagliardi (wigs). Kevin Clowes is technical director. Catt Fox-Uruburu is production coordinator. Brigham Johnson is stage manager and Toni M Ostini is assistant stage manager. Bren Thor is associate producer.

It’s been over nine decades since Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell tapped their way into America’s hearts in the 1933 movie blockbuster, and forty-four years since Broadway audiences first got to experience 42nd Street live on stage, but as Musical Theatre West’s supremely entertaining 2024 revival makes abundantly clear, New York City’s most fabled thoroughfare has only gotten more fabulous with age.

Musical Theatre West, Richard and Karen Carpenter Performing Arts Center, 6200 Atherton St., Long Beach.
www.musical.org

–Steven Stanley
February 10, 2024
Photos: TAKE Creative

Tags: Al Dubin, Harry Warren, Los Angeles Theater Review, Mark Bramble, Michael Stewart, Musical Theatre West