One Knows, Don’t One?

Debra Walton and Eugene Barry-Hill as they appeared in Ain't Misbehavin' two years ago at the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles. They and two of their castmates from that production will be in a new production at the Long Wharf next months that attempts to bring the show back to its smaller-venue roots. Photo by Craig Schwartz.

The cast and creative team of the impending Long Wharf Theatre production of Ain’t Misbehavin’ (Oct. 26-Nov. 20) has been announced, and every member has been involved in some previous production of the same show.

Which is appropriate, since this isn’t one of those Long Wharf musicals which seeks to reinterpret large-cast classics for a more intimate stage, openly questioning traditional takes on the material.

Nope, in the case of Ain’t Misbehavin’, it’s the show that got bigger.This production is a sort of regional retrofitting, restoring the five-person, 31-song revue of Fats Waller songs to the Off Broadway scale in which it began—not to mention the Harlem nightclub dimensions of Waller’s own career.

Richard Maltby, who co-conceived (with Murray Horwitz) and directed Ain’t Misbehavin’s first production over 30 years ago, is reclaiming the director responsibilities, joined by the show’s original choreography/musical stager Arthur Faria (who’s directed numerous productions of Ain’t Misbehavin’ himself) and original set designer John Lee Beatty (who did a bunch of sets for the Long Wharf in the 1980s and ‘90s, but nothing lately).

The music director for this production, Philip Hall, has done eight previous Ain’t Misbehavin’s. Costume designer Gail Baldoni worked on the show’s 30^th anniversary tour and its current European tour. Lighting designer Pat Collins lit Ain’t Misbehavin’ on Broadway and in London. Only stage manager Bonnie Brady appears to be newbie.

As for the cast, Eugene Barry-Hill (in the “Andre” role, the guy who gets to croon pot songs like “Viper’s Drag” and “Reefer”), Doug Eskew (“Ken,” the Waller manqué who does “Honeysuckle Rose” in the master’s playful style), Cynthia Thomas (“Armelia,” of “Squeeze Me” fame) and Deb Walton (“Charmayne,” who does “Yacht Club Swing”) all appeared in a 30^th anniversary Los Angeles production of Ain’t Misbehavin’ in 2009. Kecia Lewis-Evans (Nell, who establishes herself right away in the opening medley of Lookin’ Good But Feelin’ Bad, Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness and the show’s title song) was the standby for Nell Carter (the best-known veteran of the show) in the 1989 Broadway revival, and has done the show in L.A. in many regional theaters, including the Hartford Stage’s SummerStage production in 2005. Cynthia Thomas, who grew up in New Haven (an ECA grad!) and Bethany, was part of the 1995 Ain’t Misbehavin’ revival which was reformatted to star The Pointer Sisters.

Given Ain’t Misbehavin’’s extraordinary decades-long success, with non-stop regional productions and regular New York revivals, it’s probably harder to find performers who HAVEN’T been in it than those who have.

Charmingly, the enduring stage names of the characters in the show are a tribute to Ain’t Misbehavin’’s original Broadway cast: Andre DeShields, Ken Page, Nell Carter, Armelia McQueen and Charlayne Woodard. In that spirit, music director Philip Hall ought to be dubbed “Luther” in honor of the Ain’t Misbehavin’ original pianiast/arranger, Luther Henderson.

The Long Wharf production, in any case, is about scale. I asked Long Wharf artistic director Gordon Edelstein about it just last week.

“One thing you can point to during my time here is the consistent production of great American musicals. I love musicals. Each time we’ve done one, we’ve retooled them for our theater. Richard Maltby heard I was tooling around with it, and he called me.” Maltby wanted to know if Edelstein was to play around with the staging and arrangements of the show, the way the Long Wharf had with The Fantasticks, Guys and Dolls and two co-productions with Chicago’s Court Theatre, Man of La Mancha and Carousel. “I know him,” Edelstein says of Maltby, “and we talked about it. Then he called me back and says, “If you want, I’ll do it for you. Even more fun!”

Edelstein saw Ain’t Misbehavin’ pre-Broadway, when it was a club-sized cabaret show at Manhattan Theatre Club. The Long Wharf’s goal is to restore it to that dimension. It will indeed to be fun to see if the show’s creators remember how.