UNDER THE SEA, AND OVER THE MOON

When Disney's The Little Mermaid opened on Broadway in January, it was generally panned for Francesca Zambello's poor direction, the tacky scenic and costume designs of (respectively) George Tsypin and Tatiana Noginova, and book writer Doug Wright's ham-fisted adaptation of John Musker and Ron Clements' near-perfect screenplay for the classic animated film -- which, of course, was based on the beloved tale by Hans Christian Andersen.

Every stone cast at these aspects of the production is well deserved, but I fear that some very positive points were lost in the general condemnation. Among them: Composer Alan Menken and lyricist Glenn Slater have done a magnificent job in augmenting the film's score, by Menken and the late Howard Ashman; Michael Kosarin's musical direction of the show is superb; and in the title role, Sierra Boggess offers one of the most charming, vocally beguiling performances in recent Broadway history. All of this is made clear by the show's delightful cast recording, which I haven't stopped playing since I got my hands on it.

It's a pleasure to report that the show's 10 new songs are equal in quality to the half-dozen or so that were retained from the movie. Menken and Slater were especially successful in musicalizing the character of Prince Eric, who didn't sing a note in the flick. His big moment is "Her Voice," as haunting and romantic a reverie as one could ever hope to hear. The song is somewhat similar in feeling to "Why, God?" from Miss Saigon, but vastly superior to that derivative piece of schlock.

Among the best of the other new items are the beautiful quartet "If Only" and two up-tunes performed by Scuttle (a terrific Eddie Korbich) and the Gulls, "Human Stuff" and "Positoovity." The opener, "Fathoms Below," has been expanded from the snippet heard in the movie to become a stirring, full-length sea chantey. Yet, without question, the most brilliant addition to the score is "She's In Love." Written in the style of an early-'60s rock power ballad, it's a thrillingly joyous and infectious number, especially as belted with pitch-perfect tone by Brian D'Addario in the role of Flounder. (More on this below.)

I don't know a lot about Glenn Slater but, on the basis of his work here, he's an exceptionally talented lyricist. He can do sincerity without sentimentality, as in "Her Voice" and the quartet. But Slater can also be deliciously witty, as in the following quatrain from "She's in Love," sung by Flounder when he and Ariel's sisters notice the girl mooning over her prince: "She acts like she don't see me / She doesn't even speak / She treats me like sashimi / Left over from last week."

As for Menken, he has cannily quoted or recycled bits of his previous work in the process of filling out this score. To cite three examples: the main melody of Eric's "One Step Closer" is taken from the lively dance that occurs just before the storm sequence in the Little Mermaid film; the accompaniment for Ariel's "Beyond My Wildest Dreams" recalls that of the "Belle" number in Menken and Ashman's Beauty and the Beast; and the gently syncopated orchestral ending of "The World Above" is pretty much the same as that of "Somewhere That's Green" in Little Shop of Horrors. But the bulk of the new stuff appears to be completely new, and it's all great.

While each of the new songs in Mermaid is a winner in and of itself, some of them do seem a little redundant and/or misplaced in the context of the show. With the addition of "The World Above," Ariel now has two similar "I want" songs in which she expresses her desire to live on land rather than underwater; the other one is "Part of Your World," from the movie. And though Ursula's big, brassy show-stopper "I Want the Good Times Back" is a hoot, it would have been better slotted later in the action than as the Sea Witch's introductory number. (These songs might be enjoyed more fully if you program your CD player or iPod to play them as bonus tracks at the end of the album, rather than in show order. Just a suggestion!)

In addition to the presence of a large, lush-sounding orchestra, the disc is commendable for exemplary solo performances. Best of all is Boggess, whose Ariel sounds not unlike Jodi Benson's in the movie but is different enough to be entirely her own creation. It's a challenge to play such a sweet, innocent, young character without coming across as insufferably cloying, yet Boggess walks (or swims) that line with ease. Her voice is so lovely that you won't tire of her songs even if you play them over and over, as I've found myself doing. The one downside of the CD is that it doesn't allow you to see how physically beautiful Boggess is, but some full-color photos in the accompanying booklet serve that purpose well.

This Ariel is fated to be mated with the ardent Prince Eric of Sean Palmer. To be honest, Palmer looks just a tad too old for Boggess on stage; but he sounds great on the CD, singing with deep emotion and honeyed vocal tone. (It's hard to believe that, prior to this show, he was primarily thought of as a dancer.) Sherie Rene Scott's Ursula is a screamingly funny amalgam of Bette Davis, Tallulah Bankead, Beatrice Lillie, Rosie O'Donnell, Christine Baranski, and the Cowardly Lion -- on the recording, at least. Her performance was comparatively flat when I saw the show a few weeks ago, presumably the result of Zambello or someone else having foolishly instructed her to turn down the comedy several notches.

Tituss Burgess is a treat as Sebastian the crab, wailing to the rafters in "Under the Sea" -- and a significant benefit of experiencing his performance on CD is that you won't be distracted by his silly costume. John Treacy Egan does a bang-up job with the chef's song, "Les Poissons." Tyler Maynard and Derrick Baskin are suitably sinister as Ursula's hench-eels, Flotsam and Jetsam. Norm Lewis's baritone sounds warm as always in King Triton's songs, but this character has been much less successfully musicalized than the others.

Finally, as mentioned above, Brian D'Addario is amazing as the lead soloist of "She's in Love," so it's unfortunate that the CD booklet doesn't properly credit him. Four young actors are listed as alternates in the role of Flounder, but there's no indication of who is heard on the disc; I had to ask someone involved with the production, who told me it's D'Addario singing his heart out at the top of his range. Let's hope that this oversight will be corrected for future pressings.

The official release date of the CD is February 26, and a special signing and performance event will take place from 4pm to 6pm that day at the Disney Store (Fifth Avenue at 55th Street). But the disc has been available at the Lunt-Fontanne theater and elsewhere for a few weeks already, and I hear it's flying off the shelves. Word must have gotten out that, while the show is deeply flawed in some respects, the cast album is nothing less than an undersea treasure. If you judge The Little Mermaid by listening to the recording without actually seeing the production, you may be inclined to proclaim it one of the best Broadway musicals of the past quarter century.

LISTEN TO HER HEART

In recent years, two supremely talented American singers have postumously earned the great fame that they didn't have a chance to achieve during their all-too-brief lifetimes. One is Eva Cassidy, whose recordings have sold more than four million copies since she succumbed to melanoma in 1996. The other is Nancy LaMott, whom I had the great pleasure of knowing and interviewing in the years before her death from uterine cancer on December 13, 1995, and whose popularity continues to grow by leaps and bounds.

Her wonderfully warm voice, on-the-nose musicianship, and brilliance at interpreting lyrics are all there for anyone and everyone to hear on the five LaMott studio albums that were released by MIDDER Music while Nancy was still alive: Beautiful Baby, Come Rain or Come Shine: The Songs of Johnny Mercer, My Foolish Heart, Just in Time for Christmas, and Listen to My Heart. Since then, David Friedman, the songwriter-musical director-producer who was her greatest champion, has issued two more CDs, the compilation disc What's Good About Goodbye and a live recording from Nancy's final engagement at Tavern on the Green.

Now, Friedman has given us two more must-have items: Ask Me Again, a two-CD set of material drawn from various sources; and I'll Be Here With You, a DVD containing rare videos of 24 live performances plus an in-depth Broadway Beat interview from 1994. These releases will be celebrated on Tuesday, February 12 with a special concert and signing event at Barnes & Noble's Lincoln Triangle store, beginning at 6pm. Kathie Lee Gifford, Lucie Arnaz, and Friedman (pictured below) will appear, and the concert will be followed by a meet-and-greet and a signing.

Born in Midland, Michigan, Nancy started singing with her father's dance band at age 15. She moved to San Francisco in her 20s and got a day job as a clerk at Pitney Bowes -- but at night, she began to make a name for herself by singing in the city's clubs. She came to New York in 1979 and had some of her first gigs at Reno Sweeney and the Grand Finale, later appearing frequently at Don't Tell Mama, Eighty Eights, and The Duplex before working her way up to such venues as Tavern on the Green and the fabled Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel.

"I hate to be called a 'lounge singer,'" she said when I interviewed her for TheaterWeek magazine in 1993, "because that sounds like you're awful. And some people, especially people in the Midwest, don't really know what 'cabaret' is. They think it means Liza Minnelli singing a song with a bunch of dancing girls behind her. So I guess I always thought of myself as a saloon singer."

Her recording career was sparked when David Friedman attended her Irving Berlin Show at Don't Tell Mama. So enamored of Nancy's voice was Friedman that he established the recording arm of MIDDER Music expressly for her. "We never expected to make any money on the first album," Friedman told me some years ago. "I brought it to HMV, and they agreed to take eight copies. Then they played it in the store, it sold, and they re-ordered. When the second album came out, they said, 'Start us off at 450.' And they had to re-order the following week."

Around this time, radio personality Jonathan Schwartz first heard Nancy sing on one of her CDs. As she later remembered, "He called me on a Monday night at about 11:30 and said he'd just got done listening to the best version of 'It Might as Well Be Spring' he'd ever heard. Then he said, 'Who are you, and how could you possibly have gotten so good without my knowing about it?'"

Schwartz began featuring some of Nancy's best recordings on his WQEW-AM program, introducing her artistry to a much larger audience. Years later, Kathie Lee Gifford would fall in love with Nancy's voice; she had her as a guest on her morning show with Regis Philbin and offered staunch support during her final illness. Among the many highlights in Nancy's career, one of the most amazing is that she got to sing for the Clintons at the White House -- twice!

Nancy could belt to high heaven when she wanted to, but ballads were her forte. "It's important to me that you be able to put these discs on during dinner, as background music," she said. "But if you really want to sit and listen, there's something there. 'Easy listening' is one of my goals, because there's a lot of noise in music today. I want people to have some comfort. Plus everybody tells me these are the make-out albums of the '90s."

To hear her wrap her silky vocal cords around such classics as "Cheek to Cheek," "Sophisticated Lady," "Easy to Love," "You'll Never Know," and "Call Me Irresponsible" on the new CDs is to experience greatness. Said Nancy, "What I try to do with old songs is to remind people that they really meant something then. And they mean something now. I think the lyric of 'I'm Glad There Is You' is even more appropriate today than when it was first written."

She recalled talking with her late-career artistic partner, pianist-arranger-musical director Chris Marlowe, about how they would interpret "It Might as Well Be Spring," the Rodgers and Hammerstein perennial from State Fair. "I said, 'You know, this is not some dippy ingenue's number. This is about somebody who's horny!' I have to make the songs mean something to me. I may be grasping at straws sometimes, but hey, they're my straws."

Nancy often indulged in such self-deprecating humor, but "grasping at straws" is hardly an accurate description of her approach to the Great American Songbook. On the contrary, she almost always wound up holding the brass ring.

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[For more information about the new Nancy LaMott releases, and about her career in general, visit www.nancylamott.com]

"TOMORROW" AND "TOMORROW" AND "TOMORROW"

This may sound odd but, apparently, we have Carol Channing to thank for the fact that Andrea McArdle will sing "Tomorrow" -- her signature song from Annie -- in her upcoming show at Feinstein's at Loews Regency.

"I was working with Carol and Leslie Uggams in Jerry's Girls," says McArdle, "and that was at a time when I was a little embarrassed about 'Tomorrow.' One day, I was making some kind of joke about the song. Carol heard me -- and the shit hit the fan.

"She said, 'Look at Leslie! She's so talented, so beautiful, and she's never had a song of her own. You got one your first time out, when you weren't even old enough to vote. You'd better shut up and honor that. I don't ever want to hear you make fun of that song again!' I said, 'Okay, Carol!' She was absolutely right."

Post-Annie, McArdle returned to Broadway in Les Misérables, Starlight Express, Beauty and the Beast, and State Fair. Her TV credits include the role of Judy Garland in Rainbow, and the role of "Star to Be" in the Annie remake. She has also done tons of regional theater. But it's understandable that audiences for her club and concert appearances always hope to hear her sing the song that helped make her a star, and McArdle has made peace with this fact. She notes: "If I go to a Rickie Lee Jones concert and she doesn't sing 'Chuck E's in Love,' it's frustrating. Of course, I don't sing 'Tomorrow' in every show. But I don't avoid it like I used to, and I do honor it."

The act she'll do at Feinstein's isn't entirely new. "I did one performance of it at Joe's Pub a couple of years ago, as a benefit for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS," she tells me. "It was directed by Richard Jay-Alexander. But we're going to tailor it and tweak it for Feinstein's, and for Valentine's Day. I do a couple of New York songs as as a tribute to the city. Some of it is a trip down memory lane. And I do quite a bit of Sondheim, which is not what most people expect from Andrea McArdle. We're trying to change that!"

Expect her fans to come out in force for this one-night-only appearance. Says McArdle, "I think I have an indelible connection with the New York crowd; but years ago, when I first had the opportunity to do a solo act, I just wasn't seasoned enough or mature enough to relate to an audience in an intimate setting. In a show like that, the audience wants to get to know you, without the fourth wall in the way. Now, that's something I really enjoy doing."

McArdle's show at Feinstein's is this Sunday, February 10 at 8:30pm. For more information, click here.

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THE FULL YAZBEK

David Yazbek wins my vote for the most underappreciated composer/lyricst working in the musical theater today. This may be partly due to the fact that he only has two Broadway scores to his credit, The Full Monty and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. But what great scores! (He also contributed some lyrics to Bombay Dreams, but we won't hold that against him.)

As his fans know very well, Yazbek is equally adept as a writer of stand-alone songs. His new Ghostlight Records CD, Evil Monkey Man, is set for release on February 26. It includes 14 compositions with such intriguing titles as "Monkey Baby Hanging on Chicken Wire," "Bazooka Joe," and "Eight Evil Men." Selections from the album will be featured in Yabek's February 9 concert in the glorious Allen Room at the Time Warner Center, to be presented as part of Lincoln Center's American Songbook series.

"There are different skill sets involved in writing stand-alone songs and theater scores," says Yazbek, "but sometimes they overlap. A lot of songwriters have a hard time writing for musical theater because they don't know how to express themselves through characters. Basically, you have to have the ability to act. On top of that, you're serving a larger piece; if you come into a show thinking it's all got to revolve around what you want, you're totally fucked, because it has to be a collaboration. Going the opposite way, there are theatrical songwriters who can't or don't want to write personally, though they're fine when they're expressing themselves through characters."

Certainly, the Evil Monkey Man songs are quite different in tone from the wonderful stuff Yabek wrote for Monty and Scoundrels. "It's not a theater-y album," he says, "though it is dramatic. It's got an intense, angry, sad, kind of pungent atmosphere. I had no clue what to call it, and then I saw this drawing that my 11-year-old son did. He created this iconic image that was clearly from his subconscious, sort of a super-villain. I'm looking at this thing and I'm thinking, 'Jesus!' It was funny and scary at the same time. At the bottom of the page, he wrote 'Evil Monkey Man.' I thought, 'That's it!' The title and the logo were both perfect for the album."

The American Songbook concert will feature two guest performers from two different artistic worlds: pop singer/songwriter Nellie McKay and opera star Lauren Flanigan. "Back before I did Broadway stuff, I'd usually have rock performers as guests," Yazbek says. "Then, after I started doing Broadway, every now and then I'd sneak in people like Patrick Wilson to sing songs from the shows, to tip my hat to that part of the audience. For this one, I didn't want to go there, though it happens that Nellie was in a Broadway show last year [The Threepenny Opera]. I've really liked her stuff for years; she sort of reminds me of me when I was her age. As for Lauren Flanigan, there's a song on my album that uses lap-steel guitar, and I thought, 'What if we had a soprano sing that part?' It's amazing that Lauren agreed to do it. She has one of the greatest voices in the world."

For more information on David Yazbek's American Songbook evening, click here.

FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS

Christine Ebersole, you won the 2007 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical. What are you going to do now? "I'm looking forward to doing Applause and sharing it with the Encores! audience," says the lovely and talented lady, referring to the upcoming staged concert performances of the show that improbably turned Lauren Bacall into a musical theater diva way back in 1970.

Applause was a fair-size hit in its day, but is rarely revived. The musical is based on All About Eve, the 1950 film classic that starred Bette Davis in one of her greatest roles as theater grande dame Margo Channing and Anne Baxter as "Eve Harrington," a young fan who insinuates herself into Margo's world with an eye toward taking over her life and career. Also credited as source material for the tuner is "The Wisdom of Eve," the short story by Mary Orr that inspired the movie.

"Bette Davis has always been an idol of mine," Ebersole enthused when I spoke with her recently, a few days before rehearsals for Applause began. "I actually had a resemblance to her when I was young. I admire her style; she was a very formidable person. And I feel the same about Lauren Bacall. I know her through mutual friends, and when I told her I was going to do Applause, she said, 'You've got a lot of nerve!' But she said it in a very loving way. I took it as her stamp of approval."

Applause has music by Charles Strouse, lyrics by Lee Adams, and a book by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. The Encores! production will run February 7-10 at City Center, with Ebersole heading a cast that also includes Michael Park, Mario Cantone, Kate Burton, Chip Zien, Tom Hewitt, and Erin Davie -- who played Ebersole's daughter in Grey Gardens -- as Eve. Kathleen Marshall is directing and choreographing the show, and Rob Berman is musical director.

It's an exciting venture for Ebersole, who tells me that she's coming to Applause almost completely cold. "I only know All About Eve," she says. "I had heard the cast album of the musical, but I really wasn't familiar with the show. I wanted to do it based on the movie and on Lauren Bacall having done it. I just thought it would be a fun thing to bring back to the public."

Was she at all hesitant in taking on a role associated with not one, but two icons? "I've done that before," remarks the lady who tackled shades of Julie Andrews, Celeste Holm, and Tammy Grimes when she starred in Broadway revivals of Camelot, Oklahoma!, and 42nd Street (for which she received her first Tony). "You're always compared, and that's part of the deal. I don't go into a show trying to imitate anybody. All I can do is bring myself to the part. That's the nature of art."

For the Encores! performances, Margo's songs have had to be taken up by fourths and fifths from the basement-level keys that were set for Bacall, in order to suit Ebersole's voice. "I sat down with Rob Berman, and we figured out what keys were best for me," says the new Margo. When I half-jokingly comment that she could have just sung everything up the octave, she replies: "No, that would be pushing it. I don't think it would be right for the music!"

One of the major themes of both All About Eve and Applause is that Margo faces a huge challenge in trying to balance her career with her personal life. "Therein lies the struggle," says Ebersole. "It's always difficult to achieve that balance. There's so much going on in my life, so I'm trying to savor whatever time I have off. I have children and family, and I'm sort of making up for all the time I spent doing Grey Gardens. I get to cook and tuck the kids into bed -- the things I haven't been able to do for more than two years. I guess I've had a bit of resistance to getting back to work. But once the rehearsals begin on Monday, I'll be going full guns."

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PAT AND KATHY AND VITA & VIRGINIA

Some actors become really famous, others don't. But it goes without saying that talent is only part of the equation. Kathleen Chalfant and Patricia Elliott are not well known to the masses, yet they're deeply respected in theater circles: Chalfant has earned great acclaim for her work in such plays as Angels in America and Wit, while Elliott won the Tony, Drama Desk, and Theatre World Awards for her Broadway debut in A Little Night Music, in addition to scoring a second Tony nomination for her performance in The Shadow Box.

So everyone I know was thrilled when it was announced that these fabulous women will be co-starring in Vita & Virginia on Monday nights at the Zipper Factory Theater, taking on roles that were famously played Off-Broadway in 1994 by Eileen Atkins and Vanessa Redgrave. The piece is Atkins' adaptation of the correspondence between famed British authors Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. This will be Chalfant and Elliott's third encounter with Vita & Virginia, following an initial benefit reading at the McGinn/Cazale theater, another reading at the Cherry Lane, and what Chalfant jokingly refers to as an "out of town tryout" in Tucson, Arizona.

"Hal Prince saw us do it at the Cherry Lane last year," says Elliott, who plays Vita. "In all the years I've known Hal, since A Little Night Music, he had never once left a message on my answering machine. But I got a sweet message from him in which he went on and on about the performance -- how rich it was, how moving, what a wonderful combination we were. I asked him if we could use his little quote to tout ourselves, and he said yes. Then we started going around and talking to various producers."

Chalfant takes up the tale: "We both had work commitments, but I remembered how Alan Alda had done a show just on weekends at Lincoln Center. It would require much less money and effort if we could find a venue where we could use the dark night and do Vita & Virginia as a conversation, like Love Letters." (The Zipper is hosting a wide variety of other shows on other nights.)

Elliott saw the 1994 production three times ("I thought, when will I ever again have the chance to see Zoe Caldwell direct Eileen Atkins and Vanessa Redgrave?"), but Chalfant missed it. ("They followed Wit into the Union Square Theater, and I was away.") According to Elliott, "Someone said to me, 'I don't think you should do this, because you're going to be compared to Vanessa and Eileen.' But I thought that's exactly why we should do it. I trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts with people like Dana Ivey and Michael Moriarty, so I feel like I've been invited to run one more time in the Kentucky Derby -- and I get to play opposite one of the finest actresses in America today." ("Me too," interjects Chalfant.)

Both actresses are head over heels in love with the material -- so much so in Chalfant's case that she'll appear in Vita & Virginia on the one night a week when she won't be on stage at Playwrights Horizons in Dead Man's Cell Phone, a new play by Sarah Ruhl. Says Chalfant of Woolf and Sackville-West, "They had a great, long-lasting, unlikely friendship; they met in 1924, and Virginia died in 1940. There was a passionate sexual attraction between them, but more than that, they were two people who discovered a central core of friendship and communication. In the play, you can see the friendship evolve over the years, going from the entirely frivolous to the deadly serious. It's wonderful to speak their words, because they were both remarkable writers, and Eileen Atkins did a very good job of making a play out of their letters."

Vita & Virginia plays Monday nights, February 11-April 28, at the Zipper. For more information, click here.