When Paper Mill Playhouse, the State Theater of New Jersey, announced their 2023-2024 season, the production I was most looking forward to was the musical revue After Midnight, which I’d loved in its original Broadway run a decade earlier (as well as in its still-earlier form, originally titled Cotton Club Parade, developed by City Center Encores and Jazz at Lincoln Center). The show was conceived by Jack Viertel as a celebration of music that came out of the Cotton Club in the 1920s and ’30s.
It was built around numbers composed and/or arranged by Duke Ellington. And Wynton Marsalis, who aided in the production, ensured that Ellington’s big-band sounds were presented, as authentically as possible, in all of their glory. I was glad to see Ellington’s music treated with such respect, and I looked forward to the day when the show would be published and licensed so that regional theaters all across America (as well as theaters in other countries) could mount productions of this show. So much time, effort, money, and care had gone into mounting the original Broadway production in 2013. And this was one time when they’d gotten the music right. I liked the thought of audiences far from Broadway eventually getting to enjoy this terrific show.
But I don’t think I’ve ever been as disappointed by a Paper Mill Playhouse presentation as I have been by their first offering of 2024,
