• Encores! and… Millie??

What is Encores! thinking? New York City Center’s celebrated limited-run concert series of rarely performed Broadway musicals, offering starry casts and an onstage orchestra playing the original orchestrations, is either running low on imagination or falling victim to some serious governance issues. Its three shows for its 27th season next year include two eminently worthy choices in cult musical Mack & Mabel and the Kurt Weill-Alan Jay Lerner curiosity Love Life, along with – wait for it – the 2002 show Thoroughly Modern Millie, a limp adaptation of the limp 1960s film spoof.

What a letdown. The series has largely concentrated on forgotten titles with glorious music but little commercial potential, such as Gershwin and Kern and Porter gems from the 1920s and 1930s, or better-known shows that are rarely seen in full-scale Broadway productions, like Bye Bye Birdie or Brigadoon. Its most famous rediscovery was Chicago, at the time a relatively unknown show that subsequently proved a massive success (23 years and counting). Several other of its productions, including terrific versions of Wonderful Town and Finian’s Rainbow, transferred to Broadway as well. In that context, Mack & Mabel and Love Life, both commercial flops with fascinating scores, are exactly the sort of shows that Encores! was born for.

But Millie? Puh-lease. The plot, such as it is, involves a small-town girl in the big city and a woman pretending to be Chinese who heads a Hong Kong-based white slavery trade. Let’s just say that the book is not its strong suit. The website promises that the creative team “will explore the work with a fresh perspective”. So who asked for a fresh perspective for this schlock? Encores! is not there to offer “fresh perspectives”; it is supposed to be allowing us to relive the old musicals in a form that audiences would have recognized years back. We’re willing to overlook the generally poor scripts – the main reason most musicals fail – if the music justifies the trip, especially as played by the wonderful City Center Orchestra. Unfortunately the music for Millie is not even entirely original, starting with the title number (an Oscar nominee taken from the film), and the new songs are, to put it politely, not on a level with the aforementioned composers. It did well enough in its initial run just 15 years ago and has since had plenty of productions around the country, making it way too early for a revival.

So what the heck is it doing here? As it happens, Millie was composed by Jeanine Tesori, who is coincidentally the previous artistic director and present creative advisor for Encores! Off-Center, a sister concert series focused on Off Broadway (fringe) musicals. I can only assume that she’s taking the opportunity to redo her show on an Encores! tab rather than seek money commercially. But what does Encores! get out of it? Encores! claims on its website that the show occupies “a unique space in the hearts of musical theater lovers” – really? A unique space? Which musical lovers are these? I can’t imagine that it includes Encores! patrons, who are there to enjoy the storied shows and atmosphere of the Golden Age of Broadway, including musicals they may never have a chance to see again. It’s a rotten thing to do to season ticket holders, who surely deserve better.

There’s no shortage of interesting titles out there, and whatever the problems with casting (say, Funny Girl or 1920s star vehicles), politics (I guess we can rule out the original Flower Drum Song), rights, white male creators and such, surely they don’t have to stoop to a dippy film adaptation without an original or interesting score, violating their own raison d’être. Let’s hope this is an experiment that ends here.