That Old Feeling: Stoked!

What’s the first noticeable difference between performers of bygone days — say, up to the 1960s — and modern ones? It’s that the classic show people almost always smiled while they worked, and the newer ones almost never do. Entertainers used to sell happiness. The idea was to please the audience and to hope that, if you smiled, they’d smile back. They’d paste a big grin on their face as they spoke, sang, executed amazing tap figures. No matter how demanding or exhausting the turn, their smile would tell you: See, it’s easy. It’s not work, it’s fun. No sweat, folks.

Nowadays you don’t see those smiles, except on fast-food clerks. On singers, the look of anguish predominates. Everyone’s a suffering artist, sad and surly. I’m going through hell, people, and taking you with me. To show pleasure during a performance is to seem shallow, unaware of how miserable the world is. Happiness is just a thing called Old. Forget you’re happy, come on, get troubled.

Misery is appropriate, if you’re in Darfar or Bangladesh, or on the overnight cleaning shift at Wal-Mart with all the doors locked. But if you’re singing in a rock group — if you’re young and rich and famous and the crowd is screaming love at you, and if your overnight shift is taking the favors of some beautiful stranger waiting at the stage door — honestly, what do you have to mope about? The Beatles, in the first flush of their fame (when they wore matching suits), got it right. They played a song, the girls squealed, the boys smiled. Then the Rolling Stones came along and made sexual menace the new code of behavior. With Bob Dylan, nobody was a singer any more; now they were artists. And to create, artists have to feel the pain. They’d have cut off their ears if they didn’t need them to hear the downbeat.

Brian Stokes Mitchell hasn’t got this message. The Broadway leading man is making his cabaret debut at Feinstein’s at the Regency (a night club in one of Manhattan’s swanker hotels), and, the poor sap, he wants to please us. His show, a three-week tribute to Valentine's Day emotions, is called “Love / Life” — which, unless you take the / as a slash (“Love Slashes Life”), couldn’t be sunnier. His advice is to “Live and laugh and dream.” His mission, he tells the audience, is to send us out “feeling a little bit better than when you came in.” He confesses, or avers, that “The sound of applause is delicious.” (He turns that last word into a brief, chirpy song of its own.) Stokes, as he likes to be called, exudes old-fashioned Broadway vitality, charisma and optimism. What is this, 1946 or something?

It is, when Stokes lights up the stage. And ain’t that grand?

MAKE SOMEONE HAPPY

In his stage roles, Mitchell hasn’t always played men with much to be happy about. Coalhouse Walker, Jr., the Ragtime character that made his Broadway name in 1998 must pursue his racial grievance into obsession and tragedy. Don Quixote, in a Man of La Mancha revival two years ago, is the addled victim of scorn and abuse. Paul the puppeteer, in the City Center Encores! 2002 concert version of Carnival, is crippled, and expresses his sensitivity in bitterness. The barber Sweeney Todd, whom Mitchell played the same year for a Stephen Sondheim season in Washington, D.C., kills his customers and sells their ground-up bodies as meat pies. As the put-upon petty criminal (a non-singing role) in August Wilson’s King Hedley II, Mitchell plays a troubled man heading for tragedy. Even his roguish, blustery hero in Kiss Me, Kate (Tony Award for Best Actors in a Musical) is a sardonic sort, toying with the temper of his favorite shrew.

It’s not the range of these roles that has created the Cult of Stokes — that sends his own clutch of fans to the stage door after each show — so much as the power he invests in them. He has a stately bearing, the emotional grandeur associated with Barrymore and Olivier, and a baritone voice of passion, precision and thrust. The musical theater can boast of a few, a very few leading men with the gift of delight: I’d want Kevin Kline on Broadway each year, and Martin Short in any musical comedy. (Short could play both main roles in The Producers, perhaps simultaneously.) But no one exudes the musk and majesty, the showbiz sulphur, of BSM. The New York Times called him Broadway’s “last leading man”; but that doesn’t touch his regal stage presence. He’s more like the one true king.

Yet, as you watch Mitchell at Feinstein’s, in a gig that continues through Feb. 19, you see a friendly face that automatically smiles. His mouth, his eyes ... even his curly hair seems happy. You guess that, offstage, in a living room or a mall or asleep, his face would radiate a purring contentment. I haven’t met the man, but I know a few people who know him, and they say, unbidden, that he is The Nicest Guy in the World. And when my in-house theater maven, Mary Corliss, chatted with him a while back, she said he was as gracious in person as he is imposing on stage. So his performance at the Regency isn’t method acting, apparently. It’s just an unfurling of his natural charm.

THE SET

The house lights dim on the smartly-dressed, sixtyish crowd and he enters, maneuvering in the narrow space between the small dinner tables with the running-back grace of a Gale Sayers. He’s as tall as you’d expect (6ft.1) but much slimmer, in a dark, pin-striped suit, pink shirt, rose-colored tie. He announces his list of cabaret don’ts and dos: “1. Don’t suck. 2. Do it as if you were entertaining in your living room.” Stokes’ sucklessness ia a given; and the only format here is informality. It’s as if we’re in the shank of a swank dinner party, and one of the guests is persuaded to sing, and he sings for an hour, and can he sing! If this deprives the show of a certain amount of moment, and momentum, it accentuates the feeling of good vibes, which Mitchell has chosen as the evening’s personality.

He begins with “It’s All Right With Me,” from Can-Can. This is one of Cole Porter’s pick-up songs, a chance-encounter tune suitable for either sex. “It’s the wrong time and the wrong place. / Though your face is charming, it’s the wrong face. / It’s not her face, but such a charming face / That it’s all right with me.” The song is a declaration of promiscuity, and as Mitchell sings he glances around the room, being serially flirtatious: making laser eye contact, leaving a lady in a puddle of love and moving on for the next conquest. For the instrumental break soars into a scat-singing riff; fake-exhausted after the flourish, he pants in 4/4 time. Big laugh from the audience, or rather, audible smiles. Before the first number is over, they’re in BSM’s mood. Now everyone in the room is at his stage door.