A fine, funny, laugh and tune filled spree opened
just a week before the May 10 cut off for the Tony Awards. It is a good thing they
made the deadline, for they walked away with more Tony nominations than any
other show - 13. That magic number 13 is doubly important when you realize
that the show was eligible in exactly 13 categories. There are times
when one looks at the Tony nominations and wonders "What were they
thinking?" In this instance, looking down the list, every one of those 13
definitely belongs on the list of nominees for the category. We're not going
to get into the prediction business, and there are some tremendous competing
nominees, but the 13 nominations in 13 categories achievement is an
indication of the balance of all the elements. Everything done in this
one-act delight fits with everything else to create nearly two hours of fun.
When the lights came up, the woman sitting next to me, who I'd never met,
turned and exclaimed "Wasn't that fabulous?" The man sitting in front of us
agreed and the woman sitting behind us chimed in with "I haven't had this
much fun in a theater in I don't know how long!" When the strangers in the
aisle are talking about how much they enjoyed the show rather than how
expensive the tickets were or how hard it will be to find a cab, you know
something special is happening. |
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Storyline: A musical theater fan, sitting in his rather shabby apartment,
plays his favorite original cast recording for his guests - the audience. It
is a recording of the (fictitious) 1928 musical comedy "The Drowsy
Chaperone," which springs to life in his living room as he explains all of
its plot and the tiny details only a true musical theater maven would know
or care about. "Don't worry" he says "All the characters are two dimensional
and the plot is well worn." It is a purely 1920's plot of a star who wants
to quit show business to marry her true love. The producer of her new show,
of course, wants to break up the plans so he can keep his star.
Never mind that there wouldn't be an original
cast recording of a 1928 show (there were instances of recordings of
individual songs by members of original casts, but generally speaking, the
practice of recording the entire score of a Broadway musical the way it was
presented in the theater began with Oklahoma! over a decade later).
Never mind that Larry Blank's fabulous (and Tony-nominated) orchestrations
use a larger pit band than would likely have been used in '28. This isn't a
history lesson about musical comedy - it is a musical comedy. And
both musical and funny it is! The score is a light and lively pastiche of
1920s Broadway songs, the script a lampoon of the light musical comedy style
of the day, and the performances are parodies of the standard star-types of
the decade.
The cast is extremely well
utilized with lots of those "two dimensional" characters. There's the slyly
stiff rendition of a star turn from Sutton Foster who almost seems to be
doing an impersonation of herself in her own Tony-winning role of
Thoroughly Modern Millie. (Just watch her vacuous mechanical saunter to
center stage to begin "Show Off.") Beth Leavel does a smashing drunk act in
the title role. (She gets such mileage out of the single line "Who would put
an olive in a . . . gibson?"!) Danny Burstein, with a silver streak
about 16 inches long combed into his mile-high pompadour, combines physical
comedy with running gags as the conceited lothario, who turns to the
audience to deliver his name each time he includes it in a sentence ("Al-dolffff-o!").
Each of these have been nominated for a Tony in their respective categories.
The cast also features Georgia Engel playing, well, Georgia Engel in a part
spectacularly right for her, the brothers Kravitz as a pair of gangsters
disguised as chefs, pretty boy Troy Britton Johnson as the tap dancing
groom, and Eddie Korbach as his tap dancing best man. (The stage literally
smokes for their hot feet for the song "Cold Feets.")
Most of all, the magic is
worked through the presence of Bob Martin as the musical theater fan who
hosts the entire thing. Billed simply as "Man in Chair" his affection for
the material is so infectious and his humorous asides both so well delivered
and so sharp that he seems to fill the comedy equivalent of the function
Count Basie played with his band. With Basie it was all those plink, plink,
plink notes that emphasized every high point, augmented the rhythm, and
filled in every potentially distracting pause. With Martin, it is a comment,
a movement or a look that underlines every great bit, sets up the next one
and then provides the bridge between what are essentially vaudeville shtick
routines strung together brilliantly.
Music and lyrics by Lisa
Lambert and Greg Morrison. Book by Bob Martin and Don McKellar. Directed and
Choreographed by Casey Nicholaw. Orchestrations by Larry Blank. Dance and
incidental music arrangements by Glen Kelly. Music direction and vocal
arrangements by Phil Reno. Design: David Gallo (set) Gregg Barnes (costumes)
Josh Marquette (hair) Justen M. Brosnan (makeup) Ken Billington and Brian
Monahan (lights) Acme Sound Partners (sound). Cast: Danny Burstein, Georgia
Engel, Sutton Foster, Edward Hibbert, Troy Britton Johnson, Eddie Korbich, Garth Kravits,
Jason Kravits, Beth Leavel, Kecia Lewis-Evans, Bob Martin,
Jennifer Smith, Joey Sorge, Lenny Wolpe.
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