Various words have been used to describe the musicals that 42nd Street Moon presents, with "neglected," "lost," and "seldom-seen" among them. Nick & Nora can certainly claim the "neglected" and "seldom-seen" descriptors, but "lost" suggests something that someone has been looking for. After the 1991 musical closed on Broadway after just seven performances (and 71 previews of amply reported backstage warfare), the traumatized creators weren't trying to sell it, and nobody was asking to buy it. Nobody, that is, until 42nd Street Moon received singular permission to put Nick & Nora back on stage. And, I say, hooray for that.
No, Nick & Nora is not a great musical �" or even a particularly good one. In fact, at times, it can be pretty bad. But it is sufficiently legendary to rate a chapter whenever a new book about Broadway's biggest bombs comes out. I don't believe that I ever root for a show to fail, but once it has, the stories behind those failures often involve epic clashes of ego aboard a runaway train. I like those stories, and I want to see the shows that provoked them.
The unfortunate truth is that much of the good stuff does happen behind the scenes, and what is actually seen on stage seldom lives up to, or down to, expectations engendered by the not-since-Carrie stories. Nick & Nora is one of those truths, but in 42nd Street Moon's production at the Eureka Theatre you can clearly see where the musical works and where it often goes off the rails. It's as if the Broadway veterans who created Nick & Nora failed to comprehend the very essence of the assignment at hand. The only figure who apparently did, a neophyte producer who came up with the idea, was eventually kicked off the team.
That assignment was to capture the spirit of The Thin Man characters created on page by Dashiell Hammett and embodied on screen by William Powell and Myrna Loy. For theatergoers today, and perhaps even in 1991, direct evocations of the source material are not crucial. It's not like the Gone With the Wind musical tries that have never been able to overcome images of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. But what made The Thin Man franchise so appealing was the bon vivant Depression-era lives of Nick and Nora Charles, unimpaired by copious martinis, who deeply love each other but show it through clever banter in place of awkward displays of sincerity.
Nick is a retired private detective and Nora his quick-witted partner who are inevitably drawn into yet another murder mystery that has baffled the police. Their weapon of choice is unwavering savoir faire that writer Arthur Laurents, composer Charles Strouse, and lyricist Richard Maltby, Jr. undercut at regular intervals. This iteration of Nick and Nora has contrived marital problems, and Nora is tempted to have a dalliance with a dapper mobster who sings a seriously sad song that is so wrong for this show. Sincerity in The Thin Man series is only allowed to be suggested through more blithe veneers. Otherwise, it's a lead weight. The concurrently running City of Angels was an example of how to get it right.
Despite the conflicting efforts that pulled Nick & Nora in different directions, director Greg MacKellan has gotten the heavily plotted story up and running in admirable fashion, even if you occasionally lose track of who did what to whom, and more importantly, why. Set in Hollywood of the late 1930s, the show uses a kind of cinematic flashback form to recreate the crime at hand from various points of view. That's fun, and the show reaches its full potential in several numbers that have all the suspects interweaving their multitude of stories in song and dance. And then it all ends with a drippy ballad for Nick and Nora that punctures any accumulated Thin Man spirit with generic, ugh, sincerity.
The cast is in good shape in terms of the complexly rendered exposition. Ryan Drummond is able to slip into Nick Charles' personality, while Brittany Danielle's Nora is perkily charming if not cutting a particularly strong presence in this role. The fearsomely vivacious Allison F. Rich has her amp turned up to 11 as an ambitious movie star who has summoned Nick and Nora to solve a murder that threatens production on her new movie.
Many of the other characters are drawn as stock types, including Reuben Uy as the star's seemingly stereotypical Japanese houseboy, William Giammona's suave thug, Justin Gillman's wise-guy sidekick, Michael Kern Cassidy's variation on Joseph Kennedy, Cindy Goldfield as his Boston Brahmin wife, Michael Barrett Austin as a sleazy cop, and Megan Stetson as a Carmen Miranda equivalent. A blowzily comic Nicole Frydman, already a corpse as the show begins, is brought back to life and killed as the crime is repeatedly reenacted.
Dave Dobrusky's musical direction, Hector Zavala's sets and costumes, and Staci Arriaga's choreography all help make Nick & Nora a reasonably entertaining rendering of a misbegotten musical. If you have ever wanted a chance to see Nick & Nora, this is it, folks.
Nick & Nora will run at the Eureka Theatre through April 19. Tickets are $25-$75. Call (415) 255-8207 or go to 42ndstmoon.org.