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DEBBY LOVES ROSIE

If you’re of a certain age, you don’t need me to tell you that Debby Boone is most famous for her monster hit recording of “You Light Up My Life,” from the 1977 film of the same title. That recording topped the Billboard charts for a sensational 10 weeks, sold more than four million copies worldwide, and earned Boone a Grammy Award for Best New Artist of the Year. In addition to her extensive regional theater and tour credits, Boone has appeared on Broadway twice, in the flop 1982 stage adaptation of the MGM musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and as a Rizzo replacement in the revisal of Grease!. She also starred as Maria in the New York City Opera production of The Sound of Music.

The daughter of Pat Boone, Debby is married to Gabriel Ferrer, son of actor-director José Ferrer and the great pop singer Rosemary Clooney, who died in 2002. Clooney was the inspiration for Boone’s new Concord Records album Reflections of Rosemary and for the show of the same title that Boone is performing May 10-21 at Feinstein’s at the Regency. Included are such standards as “The Best is Yet to Come,” “Blue Skies,” and “Time After Time.”

According to Boone, “Every song was chosen for a specific reason to give people an idea of who Rosemary was, the different aspects of her life. The story that goes along with ‘The Best Is Yet to Come’ — aside from the fact that she loved Cy Coleman — is that when Rosemary and I worked together on the road doing Christmas shows for several years, I’d take voice lessons and I’d vocalize for about 45 minutes before each show, but she never had a voice lesson and almost never warmed up. I picked ‘The Best Is Yet to Come’ because, if she ever did vocalize, it was usually in the limousine and she’d do the first little phrase of that song. She’d sing ‘bad-ah, bad-ah, bad-ah,’ then just kind of hock up something and go onstage!”

This is not meant to suggest that Clooney should have taken voice lessons. “I don’t think you mess with perfection,” says Boone. “In her later years, Rosemary had breath control problems because of her weight and her many years of smoking. She did eventually quit smoking — I’m not sure how many years before she actually found out that she had lung cancer — but she was borderline emphysemic and she had asthma. I don’t know that any amount of voice training could have gotten her through those obstacles. Rosemary was just one of those great, natural talents. She started early, singing with the big bands. She had an innate sense of how to sing a song and how to communicate a lyric. I don’t think you can learn that; it was the combination of her experience and her raw talent that made her so amazing.”

Boone is thrilled that John Oddo, Clooney’s longtime musical director, collaborated with her on the Reflections of Rosemary album and has been touring with her in live performances of the program. “Lucky me!” she enthuses. “It’s like a dream come true. I just adore John, and any chance I get to sing while he’s playing is wonderful.” In the great Clooney tradition, Oddo will lead a fairly large band for the Feinstein’s engagement. “We’re going to cram in six players,” Boone tells me. “That’s about the limit that you can fit in the room, and it’s pretty much the configuration that Rosemary used. Because of the nature of this album and this music, we wanted to get as close to the sound that her shows used to have.” For more information, click here.

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GREAT SHOWS NEVER DIE

I’m thrilled to report that New Yorkers don’t have to travel very far afield to enjoy current productions of the David Yazbek-Terrence McNally musical The Full Monty and Jason Robert Brown’s The Last 5 Years, two very different but equally terrific shows that didn’t run as long as they should have in their original productions on and Off-Broadway (respectively).

In recent years, The Gallery Players of Brooklyn have offered top-notch stagings of such disparate works as The Most Happy Fella, Chess, and Hair, so I’m not at all surprised that they’re now doing such an excellent job with The Full Monty. As directed by Matt Schicker and choreographed by Dax Valdes, with musical direction by Ken Legum, this is a praiseworthy production of a show that would have lasted much longer on Broadway if it hadn’t had The Producers to contend with.

The guys that Shicker, Valdes, and Legum have cast as the unemployed steel mill workers who put on a strip show to raise cash are loaded with talent. Mitchell Jarvis and Scott Windham are wonderfully natural as Jerry Lukowski and Dave Bukatinsky, while Darron Cardosa’s quirky performance as Malcolm MacGregor is perfect in its own special way. The other principal male roles are played to the hilt by Gavino Olvera, Michael Roth, and Dann B. Black. Except for Tricia Norris’s hilarious turn as accompanist Jeanette Burmeister, the women are somewhat less impressive — but this sure ain’t a woman’s show.

The Last 5 Years boasts one of the greatest musical theater scores of the last 10 years, as anyone who’s heard the wonderful cast album yielded by the 2002 Off-Broadway production will tell you. That production had a cruelly short run of only three months, certainly not because there was anything wrong with Brown’s songs or the casting (Norbert Leo Butz and Sherie Rene Scott — hello!) but because director Daisy Prince couldn’t solve the knotty problems of how to stage what is essentially a song cycle in which the story of a fraught relationship and brief marriage is told in normal chronological order from the man’s point of view but in reverse order from the woman’s. Another liability was the ill-conceived set design of Beowulf Boritt. (Love that name!)

At the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, NJ, director David Saint is doing The Last 5 Years proud; and though this production also has a set by Boritt, it’s a much more ingenius one. Two huge turntables move Jamie Wellerstein (Colin Hanlon) and Cathy Hiatt (Sarah Litzsinger) toward and away from each other as the story progresses/regresses. To help make things perfectly clear, the phrases “Year 5,” “Year 1,” etc. are projected onto the backdrop or the set itself as Litzsinger and/or Hanlon sing “I”m Still Hurting,” “Shiksa Goddess,” “Moving Too Fast,” “The Next Ten Minutes,” “Goodbye Until Tomorrow,” and the other phenomenal songs that make up the score.

Please don’t let perceived distance keep you from seeing either of these productions; the Gallery Players’ theater is only about half an hour from midtown by subway, George Street is less than an hour away via New Jersey Transit, and there are really nice restaurants in both areas. So go — but hurry! The Last 5 Years runs only through May 15 and The Full Monty only through May 22.

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DON’T THROW BOUQUETS AT ME!

It’s fascinating how theatrical trends wax and wane. To cite only two examples, we’ve recently seen a number of plays about the murder and/or abuse of children and several musicals with “scores” that consist of decades-old pop hits. (If there is a God, these so-called jukebox shows are now on their way out.) But surely, one of the strangest trends to arise in a month of Sundays is that which involves actors throwing various things at the audience from the stage.

Think about it! In both of her Broadway engagements, Dame Edna (a.k.a. Barry Humphries) heaved gladioli at her adoring fans. In The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Jose Llana as Chip Tolentino flings candy and other snacks at the crowd while singing about his “unfortunate erection.” During the finale of the notorious Good Vibrations, the cast members engaged in a beach ball toss with those few audience members who weren’t comatose by that point. And in Spamalot, Sara Ramirez lets fly a wedding bouqet to be caught by some lucky theatergoer at the end of each performance.

What’s really striking (pardon the pun) about this phenomenon is the potential for bodily injury. Of course, it depends on exactly what’s being thrown and how. The Spamalot bouquet seems quite harmless because it’s just one object and it’s thrown high into the air by Ramirez, rather than being lobbed directly at some poor soul. Similarly, the large, spherical balloons tossed among the cast and the audience at the end of Slava’s Snowshow Off-Broadway are so lightweight and buoyant that they aren’t going to hurt anybody.

But the wild airing of junk food in Spelling Bee is another matter entirely. After the Chip Tolentino understudy had performed the erection number at this year’s Lucille Lortel Awards ceremony, one of the evening’s winners remarked in his acceptance speech that he had been clocked in the head by flying candy — and I don’t think he was joking. Similarly, the Good Vibrations beach balls were potentially harmful to people who wear glasses and/or contact lenses. (Of course, in the case of that show, many patrons were tempted to throw items other than beach balls at the stage. Ripe tomatoes, for example.)

Will this sort of thing continue until a lawsuit is filed by some theatergoer whose eye has been blackened by a flying object? I guess we’ll see.