Theater: Rent Party

AIN’T MISBEHAVIN’

Conceived and Directed by Richard Maltby Jr. and Murray Horwitz

To Thomas Wright (“Fats”) Waller, the three Bs were Bach, booze and broads. He was as prodigious in his appetite as le was generous in spirit. But it is, of course, as a master pianist and composer in the classic tradition of U.S. jazz that Fats has proved larger than death.

A handsome and jubilant tribute is being paid to the man’s genius at the Manhattan Theater Club’s cabaret. One reservation must be made about this frolicsome revue-styled show. Waller was, above all things, a spotlight performer and star entertainer. The structure of Ain’t Misbehavin’ casts Luther Henderson more in the role of an accompanist. Faithful to the music, Henderson lacks that explosive authority at “stride” piano which was Waller’s legacy to U.S. jazz.

Fats played piano like a jovially lavish host, and the evening is like a rollicking party—a “rent party,” perhaps, that Harlem Depression phenomenon where guests put a small sum in the household kitty and jazzmen improvised from midnight to dawn. There are 27 numbers in all and they compose an ebullient cantata of urban night music. The audience could almost sing along with Honeysuckle Rose, Mean to Me, Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now, and that powerful elegy to black sorrow, Black and Blue.

The three women and two men who deliver the numbers really deliver. Armelia McQueen is a husky-dusky sybil of song, Irene Cara wraps her voice in plaintive melancholy, and Nell Carter has a sensual verve that turns Cash for My Trash into a show-stopping aphrodisiac.

Of the two men, Andre De Shields is a cat of cool gray nattiness and Ken Page is a slithery streetwise shark with a mi metic gift for Waller’s gravelly mocking asides. To give the show its rightful name, “The Joint Is Jumpin’.”

—T.E. Kalem