Fats city Providence enjoys Misbehavin’ BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Ain’t Misbehavin’ Conceived and originally directed by Richard Maltby Jr., based on an idea by Murray Horwitz and Maltby Jr. Directed and choreographed by Kent Gash. Musical direction by Darryl G. Ivey. Set by Emily Beck. Costumes by Austin K. Sanderson. Lighting by William H. Grant III. Sound by Peter Sasha Hurowitz. With Kia L. Glover, Dwayne Grayman, Barbara D. Mills, NaTasha Yvette Williams, and Joe Wilson Jr. At Trinity Repertory Company through October 10.

The secret to the song "Ain’t Misbehavin’ " — as Richard Maltby Jr., creator of the revue of the same name, learned from watching Fats Waller perform the ditty on the grainy 1940s equivalent of a music video — is irony. The singer, in fact, intends misbehaving his head (not to mention other body parts) off. It’s this joyous naughtiness that makes Ain’t Misbehavin’, the 1978 Tony-winning granddaddy of the song-anthology musicals, so irresistible. That along with composer-pianist-moving spirit Waller’s music, from the deliriously jumpy to the flat-out. And at Trinity Repertory Company, a guest company of singers with voices as gargantuan as Waller’s appetites puts the material across. On opening night, the joint — gotten up to look like a Cotton Clubby venue of Waller’s Harlem heyday — was indeed jumpin’, as were the patrons.

"Fats was about a good time," director Kent Gash (who also helmed last season’s sumptuous North Shore Music Theatre Pacific Overtures) told the Providence Journal. His production aims to draw the audience into the party, and the opening-night crowd, ready to lounge at the Waldorf or consider the proffered double entendre of a reefer five feet long, did not have to be asked twice. The show opens with a voice-over in which Waller introduces himself as "my mother’s 285 pounds of jam, jive, and everything," and in this house, his emissaries would have had no trouble getting the ladies to step in where mom left off.

Neither did Waller, whose playful ditties capture both the sexual sweetness and the hostile spark of love. That Trinity has chosen to open its season, as Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company did last year, with such a vintage crowd pleaser seems less than adventurous. But when you consider that the Providence troupe will next besiege its patrons with the Henriad, a marathon three-evening compilation of Shakespeare’s Richard II, Henry IV Parts One and Two, and Henry V, you can see why it might feel it owes them this ebullient warm-up.

The superiority of Ain’t Misbehavin’ to many of its genre is partly due to Waller’s own genius. But the show also is constructed in such a way that nobody has to play Fats for him to be the dominating presence. Even the master’s teasing stride-piano compositions are given their due, notably in "Handful of Keys," for which creator Maltby wrote lyrics explaining the technique. There are nods to the discrimination and the injustice that ringed the Harlem Renaissance, such as a still, somber rendition of "Black and Blue," in an arrangement by William Elliott that’s so gorgeous, the uncomfortable self-lambasting of the song is ameliorated by sheer sonority. But for the most part, there’s enough mink and moxie in Ain’t Misbehavin’ to make anyone want to move uptown.

At Trinity, the performers would seem to have been cast more for their tonsils than for their terpsichorean skill — though Kia L. Glover can swing her red-sequined handbag as surely as she swings her hips on "How Ya Baby," the number that at last brings the excellent combo led by piano man Darryl G. Ivey out to join him. And Joe Wilson Jr. displays moves on "The Vipers’ Drag" that mix liquidity with an audition for The Brown Bunny. "The Vipers’ Drag" has been bringing down the house since Ain’t Misbehavin’ was a flicker of a misdemeanor. Here Wilson is lowered, shirtless but clad in glittering suspenders and spats, from the grid on a rope. Sucking his faux reefer, he proceeds to play the audience the way Waller did stride piano, with wayward wit, his moves acquiescing from pelvic thrusts to an aqueous dance of the stoned, then coming back to a full-body quake.

Wilson’s less wiry counterpart, the easy-going, big-voiced Dwayne Grayman, is as close as the show comes to a Fats figure, delivering a creamy "Honeysuckle Rose" that when the formidable Barbara D. Mills joins in grows dangerous. Wedged between the amplitudes of Mills and NaTasha Yvette Williams, Glover looks like a brightly colored pencil, but her pretty soprano invokes innocence regained in "Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now." The big ladies prove they too can move, as in a hilariously bumptious run through the bawdy "Find Out What They Like" in which the duo wear similar hats, gloves, and leers.

An oft-glowering presence, Mills charms the audience with both her voice, which can lay down the low notes like velvety drop cloths, and her exaggerated attitudes. But she also proves how a performance can turn on a dime. When she appears in the wake of Wilson’s innuendo-driven viper turn, the audience seems to anticipate something raucous. But as soon as Mills pours herself, with plaintive simplicity, into the abused woman’s lament "Mean to Me," she pulls everyone ’round, demonstrating that Waller could hit the emotional buttons with the same skill he did the ivories.