EVERYTHING’S COMING UP JULE

Broadway’s golden-age hits return in a world
premiere revue that treats them as living drama

Jule Styne

Jule Styne’s name tends to arrive attached to titles that feel immovable. Gypsy. Funny Girl. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The songs have outlived their original performers, yet they still seem written for bodies onstage, for voices under pressure. All Roads Theatre Company opens its world premiere of The Music That Makes Me Dance at the El Portal Theatre in North Hollywood on May 1, running through May 3.

Nick Adams

The evening is devised, choreographed, and directed by Scott Thompson, with music arranged and conducted by Fred Barton, featuring a ten-piece band. The songs are sorted into the rooms of a life rather than the order of a career. The architecture does the arguing.

Angel Reda

Styne did not begin as a theater purist. Hollywood came first. Songs like “It’s Been a Long, Long Time” and “Three Coins in the Fountain” circulated widely, carried by radio and film into the bloodstream of American culture. Clean, direct, almost disarmingly simple. You hear the machinery working, but you also hear how well it works. When he turned toward Broadway he did not abandon that instinct for accessibility. He refined it. The songs do not sit politely alongside the story. They push it forward, sometimes uncomfortably. “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” is not a triumphant anthem so much as a character insisting on her own mythology. “People” sounds like confession but plays like strategy. What marks him as more than a reliable hitmaker is the way his two careers speak to each other. The Hollywood work sharpened his sense of hook and economy. The Broadway work complicated it, embedding those hooks inside character and conflict. 

Neil Starkenberg

Styne had a particular affinity for women written on the verge of performance, women who know they are being watched and shape themselves accordingly. He gave them music that expands and traps at the same time. The melodies open wide, then tighten around a phrase, as if the character has revealed more than intended. Three Broadway veterans carry that material here: Anneliese Van Der Pol, Angel Reda and Lana Gordon. The men navigate a catalog that asks them by turns to be romantics, clowns, and casualties, sometimes within the same number. Nick Adams, Rhett George, and Neil Starkenberg know this repertoire from the inside out, which is exactly where Styne’s songs live. Thompson’s choreography moves through tap, jazz, ballet, and partnering work with the kind of confidence that reminds you this is, above all, a song-and-dance show.

Lana Gordon

Anchoring the show is the Kid, played by young teen Michael Zampino, the spiritual stand-in for the young Styne himself. The boy at the piano who carries the music inside him before he has the instrument or the chance to release it. The show takes its organizing metaphor from “Neverland”: “I know a place where dreams are born.” Broadway is that place. The Kid is always straining toward it.

Anneliese Van Der Pol

Styne worked with the best lyricists in the business: Sammy Cahn, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Herb Gardner, Leo Robin, and Stephen Sondheim. Cahn gave Styne his Hollywood fluency. Comden and Green gave him his New York wit. Sondheim, collaborating on Gypsy, pushed the songs into territory where character and music became genuinely inseparable. What the revue ultimately argues is that behind the catalog there is a sensibility, not merely a talent. In Styne’s best work a song is not decoration or pause. It is the moment a character becomes legible, sometimes against their will. That is a harder trick than it sounds, which is why the scores continue to feel present rather than preserved.

Fans of the golden age of musical theater will not forgive themselves for missing the first-ever musical revue devoted to Jule Styne.

Rhett George

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The Music That Makes Me Dance: The Songs of Jule Styne
All Roads Theatre Company
El Portal Theatre – Debbie Reynolds Main Stage
5269 Lankershim Boulevard, North Hollywood
Friday, May 1, 2026 @ 8 (Preview)
Saturday, May 2, 2026 @ 2 (Preview)
Saturday, May 2, 2026 @ 8 (Opening Night, Special Gala)
Sunday, May 3, 2026 @ 1
Sunday, May 3, 2026 @ 5
for tickets ($68–$185), call 818.508.4200 or visit El Portal

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