Lucie Arnaz’s ‘I Got the Job!’ returning to 54 Below after a four-year delay
By TOM GILBERT
The show must — and will — go on.
Singer-actress Lucie Arnaz is finally bringing her cabaret show, “I Got The Job! Songs from My Musical Past,” back to 54 Below in New York City after four years of frustrating delays caused by the COVID pandemic and then, last year, emergency knee-replacement surgery.
Now that she’s fully mended, Arnaz will perform the show, again accompanied by musical director/pianist Ron Abel, at that same Manhattan venue July 19-22 — almost the exact dates she had in 2019.
Has the show, which she has performed around the country in the interim, become much different over the past four years?
“I like to think that it hasn’t changed much, as that [sold-out 2019 appearance] was a pretty amazing run and I got one of the best reviews of my career. Plus, it was the first time I had been asked to return immediately [in 2020] with the same exact show,” Arnaz said about “I Got the Job!” which features personal anecdotes and a wide range of songs she has performed over her extensive career, including in her Broadway appearances in “They’re Playing Our Song,” “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” and “Pippin.”
“If the show is any different,” she added, “it might just be that it gets more interesting to check back in to these wonderful characters and lyrics and share the stories from that time in my life.”
Arnaz said she’s hard put to name a favorite among the songs she performs in the show. “It changes from night to night. And I wouldn’t have a number in the show that I didn’t love, so it’s not possible to pick a favorite,” she explained. “Esoterically, I might answer that opening and closing numbers always fill me up with a certain kind of emotion from the gratitude I feel for being able to do what I love for a living.”
“I Got the Job” as presented at the intimate 54 Below is a simple production, with just Arnaz, a stool, Abel and a grand piano on stage. But it has been mounted in more elaborate fashion, as she recalled: “I have loved doing this show with only a piano accompaniment. But we have started doing this same show with an 11-piece band and, with the arrangements that Ron has done, I have to say, it was thrilling. I was levitated in certain places. So for this show it’s either a big band or just a piano, as, for the most part, it’s Broadway tunes. We found that it did not work well at all with just a trio. Less or more only on this one.”
Arnaz, the daughter of TV legends Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, started her career as a child with occasional appearances on her mother’s second sitcom, “The Lucy Show” in the 1960s. Late in that decade, she became a regular on her mom’s third series, “Here’s Lucy” — which during its six-year run on CBS featured an abundance of musical episodes with big-name guest stars, giving her the opportunity to sing and dance with — and learn from — some of the most talented performers in the entertainment world.
It was a dream come true for Arnaz, who has said that she’s always gravitated toward musical comedy — to the point where her mother had a little theater built for the aspiring young girl to perform in at her childhood home in Beverly Hills, Calif.
After starring as Annie Oakley in “Annie Get Your Gun” at Long Island’s Jones Beach Theater in 1978, Arnaz went to Broadway to create the role of Sonia Walsk in the 1979 hit Neil Simon-Marvin Hamlisch-Carole Bayer Sager musical “They’re Playing Our Song.” From there, she spent two decades living in and around the city, so this 54 Below gig is something of a homecoming for the veteran performer, who now resides in the more peaceful environs of the Palm Springs, Calif., area with her husband of 43 years, actor Larry Luckinbill.
“Performing in New York just makes me happy to be back in my old stomping grounds,” she said “And I get the opportunity to see the friends I haven’t seen so much since we moved to the desert in California — and for them to see this show that I am very proud of.”
Arnaz does admit that she’s mellowed somewhat since moving West a decade ago, and finds the city can be somewhat off-putting these days.
“When I am not there for work and just schlepping through that city, with the noise and the traffic and the endless construction, I can’t wait to get back to the peace and quiet of Palm Springs,” she offered. “But when I am working in New York, I am aglow all day, everyday. There is an energy to the theatre district — being mostly centralized — that doesn’t exist anywhere but there.”
That said, would she consider another run on Broadway if the right part came along?
“The key word here is right,” Arnaz said. “It would have to be something I felt so strongly about doing, for whatever reason, that I would be able to justify uprooting my husband, Larry. I wouldn’t go without him and, as a gentleman of a certain age, he is functioning very well here in the California desert. New York can be treacherous even on the young. Even on me!”
“But I will return. It will happen. Someday,” she added, in what definitely could pass for a promise.
Tom Gilbert has written for The New York Times, The New York Post, The Los Angeles Times, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and Emmy magazine.