Musical resurrects 1920s NY literary round table

By Claudia Parsons

NEW YORK (Reuters) – “The Talk of the Town,” a musical
about a 1920s literary circle written by a pair of advertising
jingle writers, is like David amid the Goliaths of Broadway,
but it’s seducing viewers with its wit and glamour from a
bygone era.

One of its creators, Tom Dawes, was once in a folk-rock
band called The Cyrkle which toured with the Beatles and he’s
famous in certain circles as the man behind a hangover remedy
advertising jingle that goes “Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz.”

Dawes and his wife Ginny Redington were successful partners
in jingle-writing for 12 years, pumping out such smash-hit
ditties as “Coke Is It.” Now they’ve written a musical about
the poet Dorothy Parker and the other New York literary wits
who became famous in the 1920s as the “vicious circle.”

“The Talk of the Town” is a theatrical minnow compared to
Broadway mega-musicals such as “The Lion King” and the upcoming
“Tarzan” which can rake in as much as $1 million a week.

But when you can sip a martini and eat dinner as you watch
the show for the same price as a Broadway seat, “The Talk of
the Town” offers an intimate theatrical experience that takes
the viewer back to another time — if not another place.

First produced at a tiny Greenwich Village theater in late
2004, the show transferred last year to the Oak Room at the
Algonquin Hotel, a paneled dining room in the Manhattan hotel
where the writers and critics of “Algonquin Round Table” met
for lunch nearly every day for 10 years in the 1920s.

WITTY OVER LUNCH

The script is peppered with witty one-liners taken directly
from the likes of Parker, humorist Robert Benchley, novelist
Edna Ferber and critic Alexander Woollcott, and most of the
scenes take place over lunch at the Algonquin.

“Maybe it has something to do with longing for … a more
articulate society than there is these days,” Redington said.
“That’s part of what people find fascinating, that these people
lived by their wits and their words.”

Members of the group were among the first writers for The
New Yorker magazine and their often biting put-downs and jokes
were frequently recorded in the gossip columns of the day.

“They were the media stars of the ’20s even though if you
read a lot of their stuff, it’s so dated,” Redington said,
confessing to a certain nostalgia for a time when the
celebrities of the day were writers and poets.

The Daily News described the show as “a marvelous original
musical,” saying: “It captures the spirit of New York at a
particularly dazzling moment.”

The show’s journey to the Algonquin started more than a
decade ago when Dawes and Redington retired from jingles.

“We decided there’s so much more to life than singing
ketchup bottles,” said Dawes, who jokes that he had
one-and-a-half hits as a rock singer — “Red Rubber Ball” and
“Turn-Down Day” which made the charts in 1966.

“WORK IS A FOUR-LETTER WORD”

Inspired by a book of quotations by members of the group,
Redington came up with a string of songs such as “Work is a
Four-Letter Word” and “The Restorative Lunch” which are
performed by a cast who bear an uncanny resemblance to the
original characters.

The stage is a raised platform in the middle of the dining
room and the actors push past diners to enter and exit, giving
the impression that one might just be an eavesdropper at the
original scene — except when they break into song.

“We had so much trouble along the way convincing people it
would work,” Redington said.

They admit to using artistic license with the historical
facts, condensing a rancorous split between play-writing
collaborators George Kaufman and Marc Connelly, and playing up
an unfulfilled romance between Parker and Benchley.

“Alexander Woollcott did say she (Parker) would be Mrs.
Benchley if there wasn’t one already. We played that up for the
show,” Redington said. “You do things you feel could possibly
have been true but having not been there, we don’t really
know.”

The producers are hoping to move the show to a bigger
theater, or go on tour in the United States or to London.

“The English seem to love words more than the Americans do
at this point and it seems a perfect fit,” Dawes said.

Meanwhile tourists and New Yorkers can catch it two nights
at the week at the Algonquin where it plays in a space normally
used by cabaret acts.

Dawes said he would be happy to see it stay there forever.

“It belongs in the Oak Room,” he said. “As some people have
said, the Oak Room is the eighth player.”