Theater Review A cool crooner tackles his favorites

By Joseph Hurley

JAMES NAUGHTON: STREET OF DREAMS. At the Promenade Theatre, Broadway at 76th Street. Through April 11.

Among the theater’s endangered species, none stands in greater risk of extermination than the stalwart, virile, musically gifted leading man, able to hold his ground against the brassiest of Broadway’s female stars.

The contemporary musical theater boasts no finer example of this vanishing breed than James Naughton, who, ironically, has done just three musicals to date, winning Tony Awards for two of them, "City of Angels" in 1990, and the current revival of "Chicago" in 1997.

Now, and until April 11, Naughton is doing something even the most fearless of musical stars would probably think twice before attempting, namely a solo show in which he occupies the stage for a full 90 minutes, during which time he sings not a single number from any of the shows with which he’s been associated.

In "James Naughton: Street of Dreams," Naughton is the smoothest, wittiest and most assuredly self-possessed performer imaginable, and his voice, heard to excellent advantage in his musical theater appearances, turns out to be an even finer and vastly more flexible instrument when it’s put to the service of the pop package the performer has put together on the joyous present occasion.

What "Street of Dreams" is, pared down to its basics, is a songbag of items Naughton selected because they’re fun to sing, or because they come with an anecdote attached, or, in one case, because the song was a favorite of his father’s.

What Naughton does do in his show is trot nimbly through a catalogue of songs ranging from items as familiar as Hoagy Carmich’l’s "Star Dust" and Billy Strayhorn’s "Lush Life" to rarer selections, such as Randy Newman’s bitterly scathing vest-pocket character sketch, "My Life is Good," and the Dave Frishberg-Bob Dorough "I’m Hip," an equally caustic voyage into the realm of airy self-delusion.

Because he’s such a good actor, Naughton shines in these bizarre little mini-biographies, just as he does with a key Elvis Presley number, "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" but where the richness of his voice, not to mention his vocal technique, really comes into its own is in the ballad area.

When he tackles songs such as "She’s Funny That Way" and "The Folks Who Live on the Hill" it becomes abundantly clear that, under other circumstances of time and place, Naughton could easily have been a ranking pop singer of the crooner category.

Backed by a first-rate aggregation of five excellent musicians, led by the redoubtable John Oddo, long identified as Rosemary Clooney’s pianist, what James Naughton provides is an evening of nearly unique musical strength and variety. At the same time, possibly due to what appears to be his relentless fondness for an impenetrably "cool" stance, he never quite tears at the heart of his listeners.

That self-protecting distancing seems to be a choice on Naughton’s part, and he has every right to it, and perhaps even needs it. It is, however, tempting in the extreme to ponder the possibilities of what he and his show might be like if he were willing to reveal just a bit more of himself, or let just the audience pierce the vaguely chilly wall he has erected around himself.