<b>THE NEXT WHISKY BAR</b> Studio Underground/Shaw Festival SpeakupWNY | Buffalo NY and Buffalo News

Shaw Festival
Through September 5
THE NEXT WHISKY BAR Studio Underground/Shaw Festival

A clue to Kurt Weill’s work is the people who wrote lyrics for his music: Bertolt Brecht, Ira Gershwin, Langston Hughes, Elmer Rice, Maxwell Anderson and Roger Fernay.
Perhaps his best known work was the collaboration with Brecht, “The Threepenny Opera” and its legendary “Mack the Knife.”
The music from that song is threaded through the short-run revue in one of the Shaw Festival’s rehearsal rooms re-purposed as a sleazy, late night cabaret as “The Next Whisky Bar,” a slimy seaport bar in some port in Germany.
Even the cast has German accents and names like Horst (Peter Millard) or Magda (Julain Molnar) or Kurt (David Ball).
Trained as a classical musician, Weill pretty much gave that up to survive in this country, switching to movies and Broadway.
That’s reflected in the despair of “What Keeps Mankind Alive?” or “September Song” to “Wouldn’t You Like to Be on Broadway?” which gets a wonderful and athletic performance here from Ball, dancing and jumping along the center aisle of the stage space.
The show was put together by two Shaw stalwarts, Jay Turvey and Paul Sportelli, with Turvey directing and festival Music Director Sportelli as show musical director.
It’s an interesting staging, since the band is scattered around the room, up and down on William Schmuck’s set, while playing together.
Much of the room is set up as cabaret tables and chairs, without the cigarette smoke once so familiar from cabarets and uncomfortable chairs around the outside of the room.
The tables are set up to leave an aisle angled across for performances, like Ball’s, with some hidden doors along the outside for quick costume changes.
Then the cast in all or in groups or solo get the music out, Millard and Molnar with “Tango For A Pimp;” Patrick McManus and the ensemble for “The Mandalay Song;” Kristi Frank, Ball and Molnar with “Surabaya Johnny;” Tess Benger with “Ballad of the Soldier’s Wife;” and Jeremy Carver-James and the ensemble for “Lost in the Stars.”
It’s all an opportunity for some relatively new and young Shaw performers to get some solid exposure and some veterans like Millard to show off as a singer, something he hasn’t done very much of.
I can only remember Arvide Abernathy in “Guys and Dolls.”
For many Shaw consumers, the problem with this show is that it was sold out before it opened.
That’s too bad because "The Next Whisky Bar" is well done and thoroughly entertaining with a strong cast and some really solid direction and rehearsals to make it click.
If they do it again, go.
Otherwise hope that new Artistic Director Tim Carroll puts “The Threepenny Opera” or some other show from Weill on his schedule.
A.W.