One for My Baby
El Portal Theatre, Debbie Reynolds Main Stage, North Hollywood CA, March 16, 2025
Reviewed by Les Traub
Photos by Benny Benight
Scott Thompson and Fred Barton, co-founding artistic directors of the All Roads Theatre Company, launched the world premiere of their musical One for My Baby at the El Portal Theatre. The two have dreams of eventually taking it to Broadway. The setting for the musical is a nightclub called Dreamland. This ambitious production was very much an in-house creation with Thompson as director and choreographer and Barton as musical arranger and conductor. The songs of Harold Arlen and his various lyricists were woven into a book co-written by Thompson and Barton.
It is an old-fashioned musical that stays within the period of when the songs were written. It takes place after World War II. In a prologue, lead character Panama Jones, played by Lana Gordon, stands before the now-closed club and laments that she hadn’t stepped in when she had the chance to stop a situation that would eventually lead to the club’s downfall along with other consequences. The action then goes back in time and stays there until it returns to the original time frame with Panama at the closed nightclub.
As expected in a nightclub setting, there were plenty of production numbers that featured a dozen or so chorus girls and other cast members and typical Broadway-brassy arrangements. Appropriately, “Get Happy” (lyrics by Ted Koehler) set the stage. The main characters were introduced in and around the production numbers. Panama has a 10% interest in the club and has a personal interest in the club’s owner, Duke Sullivan. Duke has had a long-term relationship with Panama but gets distracted when he’s “negotiating” contracts with female performers. Panama’s niece Jackie (Amber Wright) and her husband, Keith (Harris Matthews) are headliners at the club, but Keith’s gambling problem is bound to lead to trouble for all concerned. Notorious and wealthy socialite Tess Fleming (Luba Mason) brings her latest “project,” singer Rick Anderson (C.J. Elred) to audition at the club. Returning soldier and hoofer Eddie Parsons (Sean McGibbon) and his gal, singer Kitty McVey (Jess Val Ortiz), are also trying to audition but the only audition Duke offers is a private one with Kitty. Throw Tess’ best friend, Meredith Allen (Lianne Marie Dobbs) into the mix along with cigarette girl Ethel (Natalie Hold MacDonald), who desperately wants to audition the legit way, and you have a setup for triangles to form. The plot basis is drawn from Arlen/Koehler’s “Tess’s Torch Song”: “I had a man. He was a good man. I had a friend. She was a good friend”; after that she had no man and no friend.
Twenty-four Arlen songs were heard throughout the show. Act Two was populated mostly with ballads, which was a nice change of pace from the brassy nightclub performances in Act One. The second act also offered more intimate contact with the characters through the book becasue the focus was on the consequences of their actions.
The cast, led by Broadway veterans Gordon and Mason, was outstanding. The songs were beautifully sung, and the difficult choreography was performed flawlessly. Hoofer McGibbon was a reliable showstopper whenever he was featured, and cigarette girl Holt MacDonald lit up the stage (no pun intended) when she, at last, was given an opportunity to sing. The costumes, also no pun intended, fit the period and the two-level set, with the 11-piece band on the second level, served the show well.
While the familiar songs were well-integrated into the show, they didn’t always seem character driven, but they were a joy to hear. This first-rate production needs a trim as it comes in over three hours. The plot may be a bit creaky for Broadway today, and it would have been an interesting challenge to place the songs in a contemporary period and setting. Still, credit to Thompson and Barton, and their team for booking this first-class journey.
