In his 1946 book The Sisters Liked Them Handsome, author Stephen Longstreet noted “I can remember when there had been no World Wars, when people still lived in a large world, and the uncles went to places like China and California and Hoboken for their sinning. It is of those times I have written… of the time when I was young and we all lived in a calm era, 1900-1914. It is a world you shall never see again.” From his own source material, Mr. Longstreet wrote the book for the 1947 musical High Button Shoes.
For its 75th anniversary season, City Center has revived this forgotten chestnut as the third and final production of this year’s Encores! series. The show is notable as the first big Broadway hit for composer Jule Styne (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Funny Girl). Super fun fact: Ten years later, Stephen Sondheim would rewrite the lyrics from one of the songs dropped during preproduction. That is how the Gypsy classic “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” was born.
Broadway legend George Abbott directed High Button Shoes and, as rumor has it, substantially rewrote the book. The choreography by Jerome Robbins, however, is what put this musical on the map. He won a Tony Award for his efforts at the second ceremony in 1948.
How to describe the antics of the plot? Think Broadway musical comedy filtered through a vaudeville lens. Slapstick humor given a burlesque styling. Harrison Floy is a fast-talking conman who dupes the Longstreet family, residents of a small-town New Jersey home. Floy and his partner in crime Pontdue flee to Atlantic City with a bag of cash they have swindled. Add in a few romantic subplots (“I Still Get Jealous”) and the Rutgers football team (“On the Banks of the Old Raritan”). Voila, a musical is hatched.
Some of the comedy is silly and dated but I still chuckled. “Are you an authority on birds?” The answer: “I’ve been hawking for twenty years.” Cockatoos mate for life. “They must be exhausted.” Phil Silvers originated the role of Harrison Floy. You can imagine his physicality and hear his line delivery in Michael Urie’s deftly conceived interpretation. He is funny and appropriately the big center of attention in this show.
The humor verges on titillatingly naughty. The lyrics for “On a Sunday by the Sea” gleefully boast “you can misbehave underneath a wave/ and nobody can see.” More controversial at the time was the song “You’re My Boy” which comes after the love ballad “You’re My Girl.” One critic slammed the two male crooks as “guilty of atrocious taste in consenting” to sing it. Others were less rabid, noting that it offered a “funny act of burlesque” which followed “the homosexual comedy pattern of that bygone art.” Let’s just agree that in this version Mr. Urie underlined the lyric “gay” with the largest Sharpie ever.
The big reason to revisit High Button Shoes, however, is for the choreography of the “Bathing Beauty Ballet.” At the seashore the bad guys, the people they swindled, the cops, some lifeguards and bathing beauties plus one gorilla engage in a Mack Sennett-like silent movie Keystone cops “ballet.” Running in and out of cabanas, they pantomime, crash, flip, dance, switch doors and partners with exaggerated whimsy. Even today’s audience eagerly applauded at its conclusion. Sarah O’Gleby recreated Jerome Robbins’ original staging for that playful showstopper and also for the lovely soft-shoe number, “I Still Get Jealous.”
I find it hard to make an argument for High Button Shoes as a great musical. There are some very good songs including the forgotten hit, “Papa, Won’t You Dance With Me?” My favorite performances in this revival were from Marc Koeck and Carla Duren who had nice romantic chemistry as the love-bitten youngsters, Rutgers’ footballer Oggle and the sweetly heroic Fran. He croons her with the appropriately goofy “Next to Texas I Love You.”
If you care to take a swim in musical theater history where football and vaudeville could amusingly coexist on stage, High Button Shoes is worth the plunge. A sneeringly bitter woman behind me loudly and exasperatedly squawked at her husband during intermission, “we should leave, this is awful.” She reluctantly stayed despite her body language which read as amplified disgust. The wrong person for this show made a good decision, however. It’s not everyday that you get to celebrate history and experience what audiences wanted after a decade of the Great Depression and World War II.