Smokey Joe’s Cafe: The Songs of Leiber & Stoller @ Casa Manana
—Jan Farrington
A lifetime later, it’s still quite a question: How, just how did two white high school grads from the middle of the last century (Jerry Leiber from Baltimore and Mike Stoller from Long Island), come to write so many Top 10 songs for Black mega-stars like The Drifters and the Coasters, plus huge hits for both Elvis (“Hound Dog,” “Jailhouse Rock”) and torch singer Peggy Lee?
Casa Manana’s Smokey Joe’s Café, still Broadway’s longest running musical revue (all songs, no pesky plot) doesn’t bother telling us the story of it all. It lets the songs—those songs!—speak for themselves, and oh, how well they do.
You know the feeling of driving on an empty West Texas highway—that moment when you put the pedal to the metal and the volume on “hurt me”? That’s Smokey Joe’s. With a hot onstage band led by music director Vonda K. Bowling, Smokey Joe’s jumps into action from the first moment, and keeps the music coming while we roll through the miles—many of us thinking about our own histories with R&B and rock.
At the performance reviewed, an older crowd sang and swayed to lines stuck in their minds since school days: “You’re gonna need an ocean/Of calamine lotion,”…”There goes my baby,”…”You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog,”—from silly novelty numbers to deep-digging love songs. And four-year-old Martha, down the row, danced to everything.
Director/choreographer Gerry McIntyre clearly knows how it’s done: his sharp, period-adjacent dance moves (hello, shimmy and jerk!) put plenty of action onstage, and terrific voices in the cast of nine keep us in the groove. The cast, from A to almost-Z, includes: Jackie Burns, Darlesia Cearcy, Marqell Edward Clayton, Kris Coleman, Winston Daniels, Dan DeLuca, Tyrick Wiltez Jones, Emmie Kivell, and Rachel Webb (with Braxton Johnson and Rachel Rice on swing).
Some of the numbers are stylistically close to the originals—while others show off interesting twists that bring out the unexpected. Musical fallout from Leiber and Stoller’s hits drifted into rock and pop music, into Motown, into Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” style, and even into the lush, belting style of later artists such as Whitney Houston.
The male quintet of Clayton, Coleman, Daniels, DeLuca, and Jones have some fine solos, but do their best work as a group, lending great, resonant sound to “Keep on Rollin’,” “On Broadway,” “Treat Me Right” and other numbers. The ladies (Burns, Cearcy, Kivell, Webb) strut their stuff in “Kansas City,” while Burns lives up to her name with a fiery machine-gun delivery of “I Keep Forgettin’.” Cearcy’s rich voice carries songs of heartbreak and passion, among them “Trouble” and “Fools Fall in Love.” Webb is sexy-cute in “You’re the Boss,” and Kivell hot in “I am Woman” and the fringe-flaunting “Teach Me How to Shimmy.”
Bowling’s stellar work on piano, and the energy of the up-onstage band, need a second mention: her heavy, thumping chords feel like the highway this show runs on—straight, strong and full of life. Smokey Joe’s Café runs through November 7, and simply as a neutral head’s up, Casa is not requiring masks for the show.
These past few weeks it’s been interesting to analyze the “we’re back” opening productions from different North Texas theater companies, everything from stark drama to lighthearted revues. Casa’s choice is to make our hearts sing—and there’s nothing wrong with that, nothing at all!
