Theater Review—

DCT Can’t Be Held Responsible For The Musical Reactions Of Audience Members

By Julie Stern

BRIDGEPORT — As the audience filed out of Bridgeport’s Downtown Cabaret Theater recently, one woman was heard telling her companion, “You didn’t have to shush me — I was singing on key the whole time.” Anyone in the audience that evening could understand how she felt; it was hard not to get carried away with the infectious enthusiasm of Smokey Joe’s Café, the theater’s current high-spirited production.

Smokey Joe’s Café is a tribute to the songs of Leiber and Stoller — rock and roll classics of the Fifties and Sixties, performed by a company of nine very talented singers, backed by a band heavy on the sax and the rhythm section.

Enhanced by Lesley Neilson Bowman’s costumes and Hugh Hallinan’s lighting design, both of which use the rich colors of neon to reflect the fevered atmosphere of an inner city café, the show’s forty songs alternate between the sweet ,the comic, and the hot.

Many of them are familiar — “Kansas City,”  “Poison Ivy,” “Charlie Brown,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “Spanish Harlem” and “Stand By Me.” Others are less so, but some of these were really entertaining, especially the cynical “Don Juan,” sung by Simone DePaolo, who can do things with a trailing feather boa reminiscent of Mae West;  “D.W. Washburn,” featuring Corey Reynolds as a floppy rag doll of a drunk, being hectored by a circle of righteous missionaries; “Teach Me How to Shimmy,” sung by the Elvis-like Todd DuBail and the spit-fire Dina Morishita; and finally, the powerful ballad “I’m A Woman,” in which Ms DePaolo and Ms Morishita are joined by Kacie Sheik and Aurelia Williams.

There is no story line in this play. Instead, it is designed to reproduce the experience of an evening — or many evenings — spent at a table in an uptown nightclub. For anyone comfortable with that kind of entertainment — listening to catchy music sung by rich and powerful voices, backed up by the kind of simple choreography expected of singers back in the Fifties — you will in all likelihood enjoy this show.

It is especially suited to the cabaret format, where Downtown Cabaret’s audiences can and do sit at their own private table and enjoy food and drink while watching the show, tapping their feet, drumming their fingers, and maybe even lose their sense of responsibility, like the woman overheard on the way out.