Sedaka songs featured in 'Breaking Up'

Photos by ED KRIEGER/Special to the Acorn NOW PLAYING—Julie Dixon Jackson, top left, and Leslie Spencer Smith co-star with Ryan Nearhoff, lower left, and Nathan Holland in "Breaking Up is Hard to Do." The production continues at the Civic Arts Plaza in Thousand Oaks through Sun., Jan. 18. Making a musical is hard to do. After the success of "Mamma Mia!" in 2000, an increasing number of writers and producers are creating shows around the repertoire of a particular writer or performer. They dash off a thin script, populate it with hit songs, and voilà! You have what is known as a "jukebox musical."

Some of these ("Jersey Boys") are successful. Others ("Love Sweet Love") not so much. "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do," which is having its West Coast premiere at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza, falls somewhere in between.

The sweet show is loosely based on the early career of '60s popmeister Neil Sedaka. At age 19, he entertained with a ragtag band at Esther Manor, a summer resort in New York's Catskill Mountains.

Renamed Esther's Paradise Resort in the show, the whitefishand-mah-jongg hotel is run by feisty widow Esther Simowitz (Eileen Barnett). She's shutting down for the winter with one last bash, which takes place on Labor Day weekend in 1962.

The headliners in Esther's showroom are singer Del Delmonaco (Ryan Nearhoff) and rim-shot comic Harvey Feldman (Nathan Holland). Playing to an aging, predominantly Jewish clientele, Del and Harvey have different ambitions.

Del is a sleazeball, twobit entertainer with a head to match, looking for an angle to get him to the big-time, much like "Pal Joey's" Joey Evans. He is transparent, ambitious and selfcentered, a classic heel, unable to remember anybody's name but his own.

Nearhoff is great as Del, believably opportunistic as he romances jilted Brooklyn vacationer Marge (Leslie Spencer Smith) in order to get to her father, who he thinks is a talent agent.

Harvey is a good-natured Henny Youngman-style comic, spouting one-liners that most likely came from original Borscht Belt routines. He's cheerfully accepted his fate: Playing Catskill resorts is as far as he's going to get in show business, so he's looking to settle down with Esther. Holland's Harvey is a typically worn-out, but still chipper comic—imagine a middle-aged Regis Philbin and you're close.

The plot, such as it is, is fairly conventional; you know by the middle of the first act how it's going to turn out. Marge has come to Esther's with her bombshell buddy Lois (Julie Dixon Jackson), who wants Marge to have a good time and forget that she was stood up at the altar. Marge, who wears glasses, meets nebbish stagehand Gabe (Jeff Leatherwood), who also wears horn-rimmed glasses. You know that at some point, Gabe's glasses are going to come off and the two will end up together.

Jackson, as Lois, is the most impressive of the three ladies; her grinding '60s dance moves are spot-on perfect. Smith's highlight is a lovely rendition of the old Carpenters torch song "Solitaire."

What makes the show work are the songs of Neil Sedaka. A craftsman of preBeatles twominute pop songs, Sedaka and songwriting partner Howard Greenfield had an impressive run of hits in the early '60s. Many of these, including the title song and "Calendar Girl," are included in the show, as are more obscure numbers such as "The Diary" (Sedaka's first song to hit the charts) and "Betty Grable," a nostalgic tribute Sedaka wrote about his boyhood fantasy.

It's these unfamiliar songs, especially the bittersweet "King of Clowns," given a magnificent treatment by Holland, that bring out the heart in the show.

All three male stars sing in the high tenor Sedaka became known for. The songs are wellintegrated into the plot, not shoehorned in, and the selections by book writers Erik Jackson and Ben H. Winters make sense and fit the characters. Cabrillo Music Theatre does an excellent job of casting and staging the performance, and the onstage band does a great job as well.

In the end, the characters are properly paired off, and the finale, with the cast singing the Captain and Tennille's mid-'70s hit "Love Will Keep Us Together," sends the audience home whistling and happy. In these shaky times, what more could you want from a Broadway show?

"Breaking Up" runs through Jan. 18. For more information, call (805) 449-2787.