Rep’s ‘All Night Strut!’ is a nostalgic, toe-tappin’ show

Try, just try, to get through the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre’s Stackner Cabaret presentation of “The All Night Strut!,” which opened Sunday, without tapping your feet and bobbing along to the tunes.

Conceived and originally directed by Fran Charnas, and directed here by JC Clementz, the show is essentially a high-energy playlist of great tunes from the ’30s and ’40s.

Set in a 1940s bar car on an American train that pulls into city after city, “Strut” has no overarching plot. Instead, each of the show’s 28 songs flows into the next, some creating vignettes and some just serving as an great excuse for the five-person cast to sing, dance, and to fly from one instrument to another as they serve as their own band.

The ensemble consists of Jonathan Spivey, dressed as the train’s conductor, and passengers Brian Russell Carey, Kelley Faulkner, Nygel D. Robinson, and Katherine Thomas, clad in stylish early 1940’s garb.

They took solos, snapped into tightly executed, complex harmonies, and even scatted a bit, which Robinson did with infectious glee and freedom. The performers captured the style and character of the tunes they sang, with Carey struggling a bit with what sounded like a cold.

Dancing, they filled the tiny Stackner stage with blurs of activity and swirling skirts, and adding percussion to a few tunes with tap sequences.

Cast members took turns at the drums and at the piano, as well as on violin, guitar, string bass, saxophone, trumpet and trombone, giving the tunes a constantly changing musical texture and filling the stage business with frequent surprises.

For all the high-energy, well-crafted deliveries that were packed into the show, it was the songs that took center stage.

The ensemble heated the place up with foot-tapping renditions of uptempo favorites such as “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” “Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar.”

They also balanced nostalgia and sentiment nicely, finding the heart of such tunes as “I’ll Be Seeing You” and “White Cliffs of Dover.”

MICHAEL BROSILOW Nygel D. Robinson (left), Katherine Thomas, Kelley Faulkner and Brian Russell Carey perform in "The All Night Strut!," staged by Milwaukee Repertory Theater at the Stackner Cabaret.