Show Over Tell

The Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s all-singing, all-dancing, truth-in-advertising production of A Marvelous Party mostly celebrates Noël Coward’s arch little songs and witty aphorisms. It climaxes, however, with a song he didn’t write, Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It,” updated with a clutch of new, 2008-specific rhymes that lay out who is doing it to whom. We get Tom Cruise and wife doing it, the women at Gates, even the Funk and the Squirt in City Hall. When we get George W. Bush and co., we’re told that they do it to you.

Then, to top it off, the singers work in a bit of “Oops, I Did It Again.”

To say this brings the house down is to do it an injustice. In house-destruction terms, we’re talking the end of Poltergeist, a house demolition unlike any seen in the Rep’s neighborhood since the last time the University of Missouri-Kansas City swallowed up a neighborhood.

As a climax, this can hardly be topped. It’s a bit of a cheat as the culmination to an evening that these performers have spent persuading us that Coward is the godliest light in all light entertainment. We all left happy, but we were humming another man’s song.

Everything leading up to that climax works well enough. Occasionally, it’s transcendent. The 30-odd Coward songs selected for this revue include torch songs, jaunty sailor’s ditties, music-hall parodies and banter numbers that sound like cocktail chatter set to music. Mark Anders sings the pessimistic show-stopper “There Are Bad Times Just Around the Corner” with such comic brio that it says more about today than those “Let’s Do It” updates manage.

For all his high spirits, Coward may be too elegant for audiences raised on charmless musical theater that settles for overpowering us. Cool and detached, pared of all excess, his songs go beyond light to airy. These tunes hit our ears, release a dollop of sugar, then melt right away.

Anders and Carl J. Danielson, who star and also helped assemble the show with director David Ira Goldstein and others, aim for something bigger than pleasantness. They bag it by tossing in some light tap from Danielson, a couple of dueling piano numbers, a Bartlett’s worth of acerbic Coward quotes delivered with a elocutionist’s precision and a tour de force turn from Stefanie Morse. A singer and dancer, Morse tarts “Do You Want to Stick a Pin in My Balloon” into a filthy highlight. One little jab, and you’ll hear a beautiful pop, she promises while executing such smooth, exaggerated pelvic thrusts that she looks more like an expertly animated cartoon character than a real-life hoofer. Her impossibly long arms and legs add to the illusion. At the end of act one, she plays a showgirl recounting the entire book, score and choreography of the ’20s musical The Coconut Girl. It’s one dazzling, jitterbugging run-on. As fun as that who’s-doing-whom climax is, it’s this sequence that makes this party both marvelous and memorable: real wit and fine melodies performed with graceful abandon. It may not bring the house down, but it doesn’t melt away, either.

These days, there’s grace and abandon to burn at the Coterie, too. Jeff Church sensitively directs an ambitious adaptation of A Separate Peace, John Knowles’ coming-of-age classic about prep-school boys living in the shadow of war and the draft.

The boys of Devon school in New Hampshire are, in this production, a breezily rambunctious bunch, roughhousing, swapping friendly insults and egging each other on to feats of stupid, breathless boyishness, most notably a leap from a high branch into the Devon River. In the group scenes, Church’s cast seems thoroughly authentic, capturing the spirit of summer horseplay, an effortless feeling that plays and movies usually oversell. Like lightning bugs, these moments, once chased down and jarred, usually die. With their easy, honest camaraderie, this crew keeps it going until the fun slowly darkens.

Real drama begins when Gene (Brian Berrens) knocks his roommate and ringleader Finny (Matt Weiss) from the branch to the river bank below. What follows is a little melodramatic (Knowles’ fault), somewhat rushed (the adapter’s fault) and at times an emotional muddle (everyone’s fault). Nancy Gilsenan’s adaptation strips away Gene’s point of view, putting lines the character thinks into his mouth without much explanation; the result is too much for young actors to communicate clearly.

P.J. Barnett’s set is spare but imaginative, with the tree branch represented abstractly by a long board and a couple of ropes. It feels real watching the boys haul themselves up, showboating around the ropes. Listening to them discuss the whats and wherefores afterwards, little of it does. It’s another show-don’t-tell problem, but in reverse: This show doesn’t tell us enough.