Chez Joey at Arena Stage by Audrey Brown

Chez Joey

Kreeger Theater, Arena Stage

March 11th, 2026 (Playing through March 22nd)

Written by Audrey Brown for DITD

All photos courtesy of Arena Stage, by Matthew Murphy

 Any modern-written show that includes a full-blown Golden Age dream ballet is a winner in my book. Such was the fact in Chez Joey, currently playing at Arena Stage in Washington, which deems itself a “revisal” of the 1940 musical Pal Joey. 

A relative theatrical flop in its era, the 1957 film starring Frank Sinatra, Kim Novak, and Rita Hayworth contributed to some resurgence of interest in the piece, and such classics as “I Could Write a Book” and “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” have entered the popular canon thanks to recordings by Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and their peers. The original story concerns the suave but manipulative Joey Evans, billed among the first “antiheroes” of modern musical theatre, vacillates between convincing the gullible Linda English to fall for him and playing hard-to-get with the married, wealthy Vera Simpson. Vera humors Joey by buying him a nightclub—the derivative of Arena Stage’s show, Chez Joey—but through a series of misfortunes, Joey loses the nightclub and concludes Act II penniless. His character development is nonexistent: the musical concludes with Joey parting ways with Linda by, as usual, conning her into believing that he’s been cast in a New York show that doesn’t exist. 

Chez Joey, on the other hand, is “inspired by Pal Joey, but unbound by it.” The story, now set in the 1940s amidst the Chicago Black Renaissance, sees Joey still using his suavity to make his way in life, but here, he’s given more redeeming qualities, and a reason for his actions: he’s been motherless since thirteen, and he feels the drive to chase “the Sound” while he pays back the debt he owes his parent-like figures like Lucille Wallace, proprietress of the local nightclub, and Melvin Snyder, a white man who was entrusted to Joey by his mother. 

Joey, expertly played by Tony-winner Myles Frost, finds this “Source” through music, bodily rhythm, and style choices, and his characteristic smoothness allows him to make his way among a group of “cats” who hang around Lucille’s Bar while making his way through a roster of the employed chorus girls. Linda (Awa Sal Secka), in this universe the newest chorus girl—and in this universe, an empathetic, intuitive woman rather than the nearly irredeemably naïve Broadway iteration—falls for Joey’s character rather than just his body, despite knowing the danger of this move. Enter Vera Simpson (Samantha Massell), one of two white characters who enters Lucille’s Bar, tells Joey that she feels connected to his “culture” because of its lack of chandelier-encrusted pretense, then, too, falls into a passionate affair with Joey. 

Richard Lagravenese’s new book for the story gives each character, regardless of their overall moral ambiguity, redeeming qualities: such is the reality of life. Joey’s struggle with the loss of his mother gives his poor choices meaning; Linda deliberates with other women onstage about her newfound feelings for him rather than blindly falling into his cons; and even Vera’s initial blunder about her passion for “African culture” leads to her realization that she’s misspoken, and she requests that they “start over” before she eventually reveals to Joey that she did not come from money, and her marriage to a wealthy Spanish baron was a strategic one. Beyond the script, however, each of the players performed their respective roles to perfection: with her concealed smiles, I, too, fell for Massell’s charm, and Frost moves with such smoothness that I cannot help but believe everything that comes out of his mouth. 

As for the dancing: all judgement exits my mind when confronted with a dream sequence. We get so few of them these days…à la the tried-and-true tactics of an Oklahoma or a Carousel, when Joey is confronted with one of life’s difficult decisions, we suddenly find ourselves amidst a misty backdrop, with echoes of Joey’s mother’s singing and spoken lines surrounding him while a series of figures approach him and embody his conflicts, taking him (and the audience) on a journey through time—from a top-hat-clad 1920s-esque figure, to Joey miming almost primitive movements of shoveling and scrubbing the floor on his hands and knees, through to movements of the present day. Unlike many Golden Age musicals, and, indeed, the original Pal Joey musical, where a dream sequence often closes the first act at a moment of decision, this piece’s dream ballet falls in the middle of Act II: Joey’s moment of reckoning comes not in the confusion over which female partner to select, as is often the case, but when confronted with the reality of his decision to allow Vera to buy him a nightclub of his own, the titular Chez Joey.  

Choreography here was done by award-winner Savion Glover, and it shows. The primarily tapped movement that fills the show is near-constant, but it is integrated so smoothly into the show that even big group numbers feel improvisational, as though they are part of the daily choreography of Lucille’s Bar, and later Chez Joey. Both the women’s chorus ensemble and the mostly male “cats” flow with some of the most period-accurate movements I’ve seen to date, but departures from the 1940s setting to emulate both more historic and more modern movements are intentionally done and beautifully executed. 

Throughout the piece, Joey is more often than not flanked by a squadron of chorus girls as they melt over and into him, catlike, such that I first thought the “cats” ensemble billed in the program might refer to them. After the first dance scene, “You Mustn’t Kick It Around,” we see Joey complain that the women have too often covered his face with their hands—at no point is he not touching at least one woman, if not up to six, and they’ve gotten so close that their choreography has choked out what he deems his more important performance. This imagery foreshadows Joey’s womanizing character with subtlety, and even throughout his emerging relationships with two individual women, he still moves throughout the stage amongst a crowd of still more dancing women. 

By contrast, Act II’s “What Do I Care For A Dame” features Joey among his pack of Cats, each posturing as gentlemen in a set of early-century top hats, while Frost strips down his typical dress shirt and suspenders to dance in just a muscle tee. Its stripped-back instrumentation allows for the rhythms of each dancer’s feet to take center stage, and the movements here are the most modern: as Joey is approached by the oncoming choice between a future with Vera and the comfortable choice of Linda, as well as the choice to buy out Lucille or continue living as he has done, time is transcended and the dancers’ movements become timeless, modern…futuristic, even. 

A few scenes later, Frost’s rubberlike movements that propel him from split to split on the now-glittering stage of Chez Joey (which Vera has outfitted with none other than a set of chandeliers) resulted in a mid-show ovation. Frost has the audience in the palm of his hand throughout the show, and the rousing applause for his dance prompts him to quip, “I was tired” in a nod of appreciation for the extra few minutes he was afforded to catch his breath. 

Rather than end in a question, the new script to Chez Joey that afforded all its lead characters more gratitude begged for a new ending, and the players delivered. In all, the highlight of Chez Joey is in the amount of heart each of its characters are granted—and the fact that these emotions lent themselves so delicately to an inspiring dream ballet.

Chez Joey has been extended through March 22 at Arena Stage. 

Audrey Brown (she/her) (@audrey.e.brown) is a mover and writer native to the D.C. region. While currently working in communications at a nonprofit in D.C., she gained experience in the nonprofit sphere from CityStep, a dance and community engagement organization based in New York City. Audrey spent much of her early life exploring the Washington performance scene, from small dance shows to the National Opera.