“Five Guys” was conceived by writer Clarke Peters, who had the engaging idea of taking the music of Louis Jordan and making a good-time party out of it. Jordan is an appealing figure, a pioneer in rhythm and blues, a master of alto saxofunk. Like Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller Jordan gained a larger public with the “entertainer” side of his persona in happy-Harlem numbers like “Caldonia” and “I Like ‘Em Fat Like That.”
It’s this laughing, jiving, party side of Jordan that “Five Guys” celebrates. The show’s conceit is that a kid named Nomax (Jerry Dixon), listening to Jordan on the radio, dreams up the jivey five singing the title song: Big Moe (Doug Eskew), Four-Eyed Moe (Milton Craig Nealy), No Moe (Kevin Ramsey), Eat Moe (Jeffrey D. Sams) and Little Moe (Glenn Turner). Like a pinata, the show rains Jordan’s greatest hits over the audience, from ballads like " Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying" to protorock jumpers like “Let the Good Times Roll” to precursors of rap like Beware, Brother, Beware."
The Moes are all solid singers (notably the George Foreman-size Eskew) and turbo-driven dancers (Sams’s skyborne splits mix Michael Jordan with the Nicholas Brothers). Mackintosh turns his smallest cast into his biggest one by dragooning many in the audience into a conga line that snakes through the theater to the calypsoid carol “Push Ka Pi Shi Pie.” The audience loves it. They love the lyric sheets that blizzard from the rafters. The sheets also advertise Moe’s, a saloon the producers have opened next door. Supersalesman Mackintosh is selling hard: you almost expect him to turn up driving the cab you take home. He could have relaxed; Louis Jordan sells himself. “Five Guys” doesn’t have the range of the Fats Waller show, “Ain’t Misbehavin”’ (no “Black and Blue” ironies here). But Jordan and the Moes are exultant and irrepressible. How can you resist someone who, in the climactic number, asks the ultimate human question: “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?”
