By Grant Golden
Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario – The Shaw Festival presents Pal Joey, through October 30th, at the Royal George Theatre. Music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart and book by John O'Hara. The Shaw Festival production is directed by Alisa Palmer.
Pal Joey begins in a small night-club in Chicago in the late 1930s, where a young singer named Joey Evans is auditioning for a job as host and emcee. While the proprietor quickly sniffs out Joey's exaggerated claims of show-biz experience, he gives Joey the job anyway, and we see Joey's initial success in it.
Joey has quite an eye for the ladies, and in no time he is working his way through the club's chorus girls. Then one night, by chance, a wealthy society woman named Vera Simpson drops into the club. She is attracted to Joey despite his low-class behaviour and despite the fact that she is married. When they embark on an affair, she bankrolls him in a new night-club venture named "Chez Joey." But she is older than Joey, wiser in some ways, and she does not trust his roving eye and his free-and-easy ways.
The character of Joey Evans first appeared in the pages of the New Yorker magazine, in a series of popular articles by journalist and novelist John O'Hara (1905-1970). They were published as if they were written by an ambitious young entertainer, private letters home that charted the young man's experiences in small clubs in the big city, often with wry observations on the people he met. The "writer" Joey would conclude each letter with the signature, "your pal Joey." When the legendary Broadway producer/director George Abbott approached O'Hara about adapting these letters into a musical, they took their title from Joey's habitual sign-off. A book of Joey's collected letters, also entitled Pal Joey, appeared at about the same time as Abbott's production of O'Hara's script was entering its final rehearsals.
Pal Joey premiered on Broadway on Christmas Day, 1940, starring Gene Kelly in his first major role. With its immoral central characters and its tacky night-club numbers, the play was immediately recognized as a departure from the usual musicals of the time. For these reasons, perhaps, a 1952 Broadway revival proved more popular than the original: it ran for over 500 performances, at that time a new record for a musical revival. A movie version appeared in 1957 that starred Frank Sinatra, Kim Novak and Rita Hayworth.
One curiosity of The Shaw's 2004 season is the relationship between our two musicals. The music for Pal Joey was written by Richard Rodgers, one of Broadway's greatest composers, while Floyd Collins was written by his grandson Adam Guettel - a leading composer of another generation of musical theatre.
Click the "listen" icon above to hear WBFO Theatre Critic Grant Golden's review of Pal Joey.
Above description courtesy of the Shaw Festival.