The Skylight’s Collier and Cobb serve Gershwin & Friends well

The more you get to know Cynthia Cobb and Parrish Collier over the course of Gershwin and Friends, the more you like and admire them.

The couple put together the new revue, of songs by Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Fats Waller and Duke Ellington, for the Skylight Opera Theatre’s 99-seat Studio Theatre, with director Bill Theisen and music director/pianist Paul Helm. The show opens New Year’s Eve; I saw it at the smooth-running final dress rehearsal Thursday, along with an invited audience that packed the place.

The conceit of the show: Act 1 takes place in the caterer’s room of Gershwin’s Long Island estate, where the featured couple serves offstage guests. Helm, upstaged at the piano by Gershwin, as usual, waits around for his check. After midnight, they all leave for their own New Year’s celebration in Harlem. Cobb and Collier, a couple offstage, play a couple onstage. The 38 songs generally trace their up-and-down relationship.

The two need no more than that wisp of plot to let their chemistry fill the room. They slowly welcome you into their complex but essentially playful, respectful relationship. The joy they take in one another — his joy in her extraordinary singing, hers in his extraordinary humor and charm — is infectious. The relationship is beautiful but not syrupy or strained, and it is a pleasure to be in the room with them. As time goes on, you become privy to the subtleties of the fun they’re having; the in-jokes get funnier as you pick up on them. A show such as this places great burdens on the performers — they sing, they dance, they must be “on” in a big way for the entire 90 minutes. Cobb, Collier and Helm, too, bear the burdens lightly. They appear to be having a blast, which means we can stop worrying about them and have a blast, too.

Cobb is a glorious singer and a pretty good dancer. Collier is a fine hoofer and a great comic; his singing was a bit thin in the first act but opened up beautifully in the second. I also liked the 1960s R&B inflections he brought to these jazz-inflected songs. They put his personal stamp on them, without mannerism. His style fit the music even as it brought something new to it.

Cobb can break your heart with bluesy vulnerability (Body and Soul), delight the ear with utter vocal beauty and sensitivity (Someone to Watch Over Me), and burn the place down with hot-mama sexuality (Hit Me with a Hot Note, Ain’t Misbehavin’). Collier’s reaction to Misbehavin’ was right on: He looked like Wiley E. Coyote the moment after the stick of dynamite has blown up in his face.

Collier doesn’t have that sort of spectacular voice, but he does have great interpretive sensibility. He took on Ellington’s daunting, complicated Sophisticated Lady and brought it to its full stature as a profound portrait of loneliness. That song segued to Cobb’s heartbreaking In My Solitude, for a double whammy.

The deep blues — the Indigos, if you get my drift — of the middle part of Act 2 contrast neatly with the bright fun of the first act and prepared the return of sunshine at the end. The emotional range and balance of the show satisfies and maintains interest. Cobb, Collier, Helm and Theisen really thought this thing through. Gershwin and Friends deserves to have a life beyond Jan. 9, the final show of this premiere run.

New Year’s Eve is SOLD OUT. Click here for the full schedule and to purchase tickets, $37.50 each, online. Tickets are also on sale at the Broadway Theatre Center box office, 414-291-7800.