BROADWAY'S POWER COUPLE

Spotlight

Let's say you plan to stage a big Broadway musical this spring and you want to offer something without sticky-fingered superheroes, green-faced witches, or royal lions. Let's say you go for something radical and you make it a love story between two human beings, set during the rum-running 1920s and with songs by a couple of brothers who died long before Auto-Tune was born. You could do no better than Nice Work if You Can Get It, starring Matthew Broderick and Kelli O'Hara, directed by Kathleen Marshall, and with music, of course, by George and Ira Gershwin. Nice Work is inspired by Oh, Kay, produced in 1926, with a book by P. G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton, but the Gershwin estate told the Tony-award-winning ^ lyricist Joe DiPietraJMempfiis) to change what he wanted. "I took the bones and made it^my own," says DiPietro. The plot still involves playboy Jimmy WinterYBroderick) on the eve of his wedding and some unexpected visitors, including a hardened rumrunner, played by O'Hara. (See where this is going?) Aside from DiPietro's handiwork and adding songs from other Gershwin shows, Nice Work is freshly choreographed by Marshall, who has collected three Tonys (Wonderful Town, Pajama Game, and Anything Goes). "I sometimes feel I was born in the wrong era, because I love screwball romantic comedies," Marshall says. Two-time Tony winner Broderick (this show might as well be titled Tony!) first realized what a wallop a musical can deliver when he saw the movie Top Hat with his mom at a revival theater in New York in the 1970s. "Everything came together—the dancing, singing, the story," he says. The Broadway show that first impressed O'Hara, who trained as an opera singer, was Ragtime, which showed her that a modern Broadway musical could have operatic sweep. And how are the two stars, who have not worked together before, getting along? Broderick, hardpressed to pick his favorite Gershwin song, now thinks it may beA "Someone to Watch over Me" since hearing O'Hara sing it. And as for O'Hara, she has been drawn to Broderick's "vulnerability" sind& seeing him as Ferris Bueller. Nice work, indeed.

JIM KELLY

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