‘Wizard of Song’ returns to Las Vegas

You already know his music. Everybody does.

That is, everybody who’s ever followed the yellow brick road “Over the Rainbow” to Oz.

But there’s more — much more — to composer Harold Arlen than “The Wizard of Oz,” as the musical revue “The Wonderful Wizard of Song” demonstrates this weekend at The Smith Center’s Cabaret Jazz.

The show may be making its Smith Center debut, but it’s hardly a Las Vegas premiere.

Created by longtime local singer, pianist and composer George Bugatti — along with the composer’s son Sam Arlen and “American Idol” musical director Nigel Wright — “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” was written in Las Vegas and workshopped at Debbie Reynolds’ now-closed hotel-casino.

It returns to Las Vegas following an 18-month off-Broadway run at St. Luke’s Theatre in New York.

This weekend’s Cabaret Jazz production “is the New York version with some bells and whistles,” Bugatti notes in a telephone interview. “We all joked around about calling it ‘a historical.’ It’s not a conventional musical.”

On stage, Bugatti joins fellow New York cast member Marcus Goldhaber and Las Vegas-based Steve Judkins (whose credits include the Tropicana’s now-closed “Mamma Mia!”) to form the Three Crooners, who perform the show’s Arlen classics.

That is, the ones not sung by Antoinette Henry, another veteran of the show’s New York run, who sings numbers associated with such vocal powerhouses as Pearl Bailey and Ethel Waters.

While the show fits the definition of a “jukebox musical,” it’s a “jukebox from the ’40s” (and before), loaded with non-“Oz” Arlen classics including “Stormy Weather,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “Let’s Fall in Love,” “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” “That Old Black Magic” and “Accentuate the Positive.”

But the show places those songs, and many more, in context through a series of vignettes that trace Arlen’s professional journey, from New York’s famed Cotton Club to Hollywood (including his work on “The Wizard of Oz” with lyricist E.Y. Harburg) and on to Broadway with such musicals as “Bloomer Girl,” “Saratoga,” “Jamaica,” “House of Flowers” and “St. Louis Woman.”

If those Broadway shows lack the instant-recognition factor of, say, “The Wizard of Oz,” that’s one reason Arlen’s name doesn’t always appear alongside such legendary songwriters as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin or Cole Porter, according to Bugatti.

“Harold was never involved with hit Broadway shows,” he notes. “He never quite got a foothold with a strong Broadway show” — and the Broadway shows Arlen did write never made it to the big screen.

In addition, Arlen never employed a publicist, Bugatti adds — in part because Arlen’s wife, Anya, was in ill health, “in and out of sanitariums” during the composer’s heyday, and he wanted to maintain the family’s privacy.

“The Wonderful Wizard of Song’s” opening vignette addresses this situation.

It’s set “sometime in the late ’30s or early ’40s,” somewhere in New York City, Bugatti explains, as Arlen gets into a taxicab and the cabby’s whistling “Stormy Weather,” which Arlen identifies as one of his songs.

“Who are you?” the driver inquires, guessing the names Berlin, Porter and Richard Rodgers (the musical half of two legendary Broadway teams, first with lyricist Lorenz Hart and then with Oscar Hammerstein).

“Harold Arlen,” the composer replies, prompting this response from the cabdriver: “Harold who?”

Audiences who catch “The Wonderful Wizard of Song” won’t have any trouble answering that question, thanks in part to the involvement of Arlen’s son Sam, who’s provided archival and historical content for the show— including behind-the-scenes footage his father took during production of “The Wizard of Oz.”

Although Sam Arlen “has given me a lot of creative license,” Bugatti acknowledges, the show’s focus remains on Arlen’s music — and a “signature sound that’s unmistakably Arlen,” thanks to an only-in-America mash-up of musical styles.

Born in 1906, Arlen was the son of a cantor (the Jewish synagogue official who leads the congregation in musical prayer) and thus “was raised with his father’s curatorial improvisations,” Bugatti explains.

At home, young Arlen was “only allowed to listen to, and play, classical music,” he notes. Except when the family’s downstairs neighbors, an African-American family, listened to “the new sounds of jazz” on their gramophone, providing “an important addition that makes the Arlen soup.”

That musical soup started cooking when Arlen was a teenager, in his hometown of Buffalo, N.Y., where he played with local bands, at movie and vaudeville houses and cabarets before his Cotton Club breakthrough, where he and lyricist Ted Koehler came up with such tunes as “I’ve Got the World on a String” and “Stormy Weather.”

Bugatti and Arlen’s son Sam first came up with the idea for “The Wonderful Wizard of Song” prior to the composer’s 2004-2005 centennial celebration, but Bugatti “was ensconced in jazz music,” he says, “and I didn’t know about the show world.” So Bugatti called “American Idol’s” Wright, who was “Andrew Lloyd Webber’s executive music producer for 27 years.”

He “took the concept Sam and I had come up with and built bones and a skeleton” for the show, which is directed and choreographed by Broadway veteran Gene Castle. Joey Singer, Debbie Reynolds’ longtime musical director, also serves as musical director for “The Wonderful Wizard of Song.”

In addition to the revue that’s playing Cabaret Jazz this weekend, there’s also a “full-blown book version, which has yet to be put up on its feet,” explains Bugatti, who’s recently been performing around town, from the Downtown Grand’s Mob Bar to the Bootlegger Bistro south of the Strip.

“Ever since I’ve been back, Las Vegas has been one big open arm,” he says. “I feel lovely about the fact” that “The Wonderful Wizard of Song” is back in Las Vegas too. After all, “the show was born here — and now it’s come home.”

Contact reporter Carol Cling at ccling@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0272.