The story is an innocent one that starts off with simple motivations but doesn’t fear stretching into more adult themes like not feeling accepted, health issues and corporate takeovers. They’re competing in a tournament that needs a four-player team and he’s the one to fill that slot, whether he wants to or not. He ventures into the local arcade, the titular Button City, and quickly makes new friends that invite him to play games together. The story starts when Fennel, a shy young fox, moves into town. Gregory in “I Still Get Jealous” (the other number, along with “Bathing Beauty Ballet,” that replicates Robbins’s choreography).Home › Gaming › Button City game review: Time to save the Arcade She’s delightful leading an ensemble of fine-feathered local ladies in “Bird Watcher’s Song,” or dancing a deft soft shoe with Mr. Playing the young suburban matriarch Sara Longstreet (a role originated by Nanette Fabray), Betsy Wolfe creates a precise and surprisingly subtle comic portrait, a mix of self-effacing gentility and aggressive ambition.
And the talented crew portraying their patsies includes Matt Loehr, Chester Gregory, Mylinda Hull, Aidan Alberto and, as the fresh-faced, sweet-voiced young lovers, Marc Koeck and Carla Duren. Kevin Chamberlin brings his always welcome, sheepish air of bonhomie to the part of Floy’s sidekick and accomplice, Mr. Urie gives a characteristically skillful performance, but it feels pasted on. More crucially, he lacks the streak of shiny malice that gave an edge to Silvers’s clowning. It must be said that he has only a touch-and-go relationship with a melody line. He also has the rim-shot-inspiring vaudeville delivery down cold, and he remains as Gumby-like as ever. Urie - the winning comic actor who starred in the recent revival of Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song” - offers a bright, tooth-flashing facsimile of the Silvers grin here. Floy must have been a perfect fit for Silvers, a graduate of burlesque who had the most sincerely insincere smile in the business. This was four years after “Oklahoma!” first startled audiences with its visions of brave new possibilities for psychological depth in the American musical and two years after the brooding “Carousel,” also from Rodgers and Hammerstein, opened on Broadway.Ī captivating con man (here named Harrison Floy) descends on a guileless American town (New Brunswick, N.J.), charms and fleeces its inhabitants and (spoiler alert) is forgiven by the final curtain because he is, after all, so darn irresistible. That’s perhaps as it should be for a show that was regarded as a chipper, mindless throwback even when it opened in 1947. The last of this season’s Encores! musicals in concert has the approximate fizz and flavor of a vanilla egg cream. Theatergoers of this mind may well find solace in the twinkly “High Button Shoes,” a nearly forgotten frolic from the late-1940s that is occupying New York City Center this weekend, with a cast led by the indefatigable Michael Urie. Were you left feeling chafed by those harsh, hot winds sweeping through this season’s revisionist, Tony-nominated production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!”? Are you longing for a revival that lets a cheerful old American musical remain its cheerful old self, with any inner darkness undisclosed?
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