Riding the rails On the Twentieth Century gets revived BY IRIS FANGER

When the Cy Coleman/Betty Comden/Adolph Green musical On the Twentieth Century opened on Broadway in 1978, Variety wrote, "It’s ominous when an audience leaves the musical whistling the scenery." Although the show garnered Tony awards for composer Coleman, scenic designer Robin Wagner, Kevin Kline in his Broadway debut, and John Cullum, who played the flamboyant producer Oscar Jaffee, and ran a respectable 449 performances, it’s never had a Broadway revival. But Overture Productions, which presents concert productions of musicals, will mount it at the Cutler Majestic Theatre next weekend.

Tony McLean, former president of Broadway in Boston, is directing the project. On January 11, 1978, when On the Twentieth Century opened in its pre-Broadway tryout at the Colonial Theatre, McLean was a stage-struck drama major at Boston University. He was there on opening night and has the program to prove it. Begging to differ with Variety, he describes the show as a "screwball comedy set to music" and the score as "wonderful." His solution to the scenery is a corps of nine Boston hoofers as porters who will tap out the rhythms of the train. And he and Overture founder and producer Deb Poppel have snared some New York talent to head the cast: George Dvorsky, a matinee idol familiar from his many leads at North Shore Music Theatre and his star turns on Broadway, and New York musical-theater hottie Alice Ripley, the original Violet Hilton in the Broadway hit Side Show. Dvorsky also will appear in The Full Monty at NSMT, which is slated for November back in the company’s now-being-rebuilt Beverly theater.

The company for On the Twentieth Century includes a 30-member ensemble, eight leads, and an on-stage orchestra of 24. That’s the biggest production so far for Overture, which mounted The Baker’s Wife in 2001 and Follies in 2004. The $85,000 budget for On the Twentieth Century is coming mostly from Poppel’s wallet, with a donation from John Hancock Financial, where she’s worked for the past 30 years. A performer herself who’s had small parts in the Overture productions, she says, "I don’t have to audition since I’m the producer. It’s my little way of creating beauty and joy. I’ve been lucky. I’m a vice-president at John Hancock; my son is grown up and paid for; I don’t have a boat; I don’t take expensive vacations. This is like my second child in college."

Both Poppel and McLean are evangelical about local theater. "There’s a great energy of collaboration within the ensemble," McLean explains. "There’s no personal gain in terms of money, just personal satisfaction. It’s why we all went into theater in the first place. The cast is very professional, yet very warm. Sometimes those things don’t go hand in glove,"

Overture Productions presents On The Twentieth Century | Cutler Majestic Theatre, 219 Tremont St, Boston | Sept 23-25 | $20-$60 | 800.233.3133 or http://www.maj.org/.