And the World Goes 'Round

With scenic and technical embellishments added and the title simplified to The World Goes 'Round, the revised edition included mostly upbeat, unfamiliar songs from the team's lesser musicals: The Happy Time, The Rink, The Act, Flora the Red Menace, and what was then a work-in-progress, Kiss of the Spider Woman.

The shows cast included Kimberly Chan, Chinie Concepcion, Samantha Kwok, Brett Khaou, Hannah Lucas, Renfred Ng, Jordan Prainito and Rachel Tay.

In his New York Times review, Frank Rich wrote: And the World Goes 'Round: The Songs of Kander and Ebb, the new revue at the commodiously renovated Westside Theater, may be its authors' long overdue smash.

The evening is an unexpected delight: a handsome, tasteful, snazzily staged outpouring of song and dance that celebrates all the virtues of the Kander-Ebb catalogue while scrupulously avoiding most of the cloying cliches of and-then-I-wrote anthologies.

The revue is sophisticated enough to satisfy aficionados like myself, who recently spent a week's allowance to replace a worn copy of the out-of-print cast album of The Happy Time, and welcoming enough to convert new audiences to the Kander-Ebb fold.