Moe Better Blues

SPOTLIGHT

Forget chandeliers, helicopters, and barricades. Five Guys Named Moe, Broadway's latest musical import from Britain, is actually about music; it's a giddy, feel-good celebration of Louis Jordan, the master jazzman of jive. If an American bandleader/singer/saxophonist sounds like an odd subject for an English show, Five Guys was created and directed by expat Yanks (Clarke Peters and Charles Augins, respectively), and it began in October 1990 at the ever funky Theatre Royal Stratford East, on London's theatrical "fringe.''' Its path from the East End to the Eugene O'Neill Theatre on Broadway is due to producer Cameron Mackintosh, who had decided by intermission one evening to take the show to Shaftesbury Avenue and beyond. "I was bowled over," recalls Mackintosh, who found himself chanting and congaing with the crowd at the first-act finale: "Push-ka-pi-shi-pie—eh-eh." The story involves a lovesick DJ. whose radio bursts into life with a rollicking quintet of Moes, but London audiences have been responding to the show's punchy exuberance, not its plot— and to such songs as "Dad Gum Your Hide Boy" and "Saturday Night Fish Fry." Is Mackintosh concerned that a New York public raised on spectacle may find Five Guys slight? "I think this is a Broadway show," he replies. And anyway, he says, "in the end, I never get hooked on scale; I do a show because I like it." MATT WOLF

A giddy, feel-good celebration of the master jazzman of jive.