How to Succeed, still, after all these years

Brown-nosing never goes out of fashion. That's why How to Succeed in Business Without Really  Trying feels so current in its 50-year Broadway revival that opened Sunday night with a delightful Daniel Radcliffe as the obsequious, guile-driven kid who works his way up the great World Wide Wicket Company.

In fact, the show itself - arguably the peppiest, cheeriest, most charming Broadway revival since The Pajama Game five seasons back - never seems dated, remarkable when you consider that the world it portrays is so Populuxe you feel as though you should have arrived at Hirschfeld Theatre in an automobile with car fins and popped an orange-flavored Fizzie tablet into a glass of water during intermission.

The style of the late '50s and early '60s - defined here by Derek McLane's scenery, Catherine Zuber's costumes and Howell Binkley's lighting - probably never looked so good except in memory; How to Succeed's stage design drops you solidly back in the day and never lets you forget you're there.

Frank Loesser's songs keep the plot moving up - just like Radcliffe's character moves up as he reads carefully from a book on climbing the corporate ladder (a recorded Anderson Cooper narrates these snippets). And director-choreographer Rob Ashford sets dances onto the show that mirror precisely its goofy sensibility.

Those dancing lessons Radcliffe took, as he emerged from a film-acting life as Harry Potter, paid off; he executes the show's sometimes complex, quick choreography easily with one of Broadway's best current ensembles. The singing instruction: Not quite as successful, but Radcliffe is more than passable, and holds his own in "I Believe in You" and "Brotherhood of Man," two of the show's best numbers.

Ashford's meticulous production bulges with talent: the versatile film actor John Larroquette, in his Broadway debut, plays the corporation's crusty but easily swayed boss; Christopher J. Hanke is the rival who can't climb the ladder for trying and Tammy Blanchard plays the siren secretary who's also the boss' babe.

Radcliffe's character eventually falls in love with a company secretary, endearingly played by a Broadway newcomer - Rose Hemingway, better-known in Philadelphia as RoseMary Christina Szczesniak, a Mount Airy native who's performed in Mamma Mia's national tour and before that, in many stage roles as a student at Mount St. Joseph Academy in Flourtown, class of 2001.

Hemingway is adorable, with a classic Broadway voice that gives her character oomph and a solid stage presence that gives it life. When they coo or fight, she and Radcliffe are the portrait of ... well, what some of us remember we were like in the '50s and '60s. The real ones, when the choreography wasn't anywhere as good.