'Drowsy Chaperone' revels in music, mirth and mayhem
The spirited musical is guaranteed to keep its audiences awake.
By John Fleming, Times Performing Arts Critic
Published January 17, 2008
The Drowsy Chaperone
The musical runs through Sunday at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, Tampa. $32.50-$72.50 plus service charges. (813) 229-7827; toll-free 1-800-955-1045; www.tbpac.org.
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TAMPA - If the measure of a successful musical is having an infectious melody stuck in your mind afterward, then The Drowsy Chaperone is a smash. Fancy Dress, Accident Waiting to Happen, Love Is Always Lovely in the End - all of these songs are the musical equivalents of chewing gum on a shoe.
But there's a lot more to The Drowsy Chaperone, which opened Tuesday at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, than just catchy tunes. This is a show, after all, whose first words create an instant bond with chronic theatergoers.
"I hate theater," says a voice in the dark. "Please let it be a good show."
The lights come up on a dingy apartment where a man in corduroys and a cardigan settles into an easy chair and puts on his favorite Broadway album, Gable and Stein's The Drowsy Chaperone from 1928.
For the next 100 minutes there is no intermission, the Man in Chair, played by Jonathan Crombie, leads the audience through the made-up musical. Periodically, his apartment is transformed into an estate where a wedding party is under way. All the characters called for in such a stock scenario are here, including the starlet bride and her betrothed, scion to an oil fortune; a cigar-chomping producer and his ditsy girlfriend; a tap-dancing best man; a pair of gangsters disguised as pastry chefs; and a Latin Lothario. There's even an aviatrix named Trix, who lands her biplane on the estate while flying down to Rio.
Then there's the title character, a cynical quipster with a champagne flute in hand at all times ("drowsy" is a Prohibition-era euphemism for "drunk"), whose task is to uphold the wedding-day superstition of keeping the bride from coming in contact with the groom before the ceremony. As the Man in Chair drolly notes, that's the extent of the plot, mainly an excuse to stage extravagant song and dance numbers.
In some ways, The Drowsy Chaperone - billed as "a musical within a comedy" - provides the best of both worlds. For diehard musical fans, it is artfully conceived (with music and lyrics by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison and book by Bob Martin and Don McKellar) froth that replicates the offhand brilliance of Jazz Age shows by the Gershwins. There's also a hilarious spoof of The King and I when Man in Chair puts on the wrong record.
And for people who hate musicals, there is the solo show of Man in Chair, who wittily expounds on everything from global warming ("November is the new August") to the similarities between pornography and musical theater.
There is a nostalgia that may be lost on anyone who grew up in the digital age. A prominent theme is the Man in Chair's affection for LP vinyl records. "Hear that static?" he says. "I love that sound . . . the sound of a time machine."
Crombie strikes a deft balance between cranky eccentric and musical theater Everyman. He is a deceptively smooth singer and hoofer himself, as when he joins in with the show's glamorous ingenue, Janet Van De Graaff (Andrea Chamberlain), in Bride's Lament, a preposterously over the top number that includes a mad scene.
Chamberlain is charming in numbers like Show Off, in which Janet ranges from plate spinning to lariat twirling to cartwheeling while making numerous costume changes. Nancy Opel brings superb comic timing to the title role. Asked by Janet if she has ever been married, the chaperone replies, "No, I drink for pleasure, not out of necessity." Her booming anthem, As We Stumble Along, owes something of a debt to Ethel Merman.
Casey Nicholaw directed and choreographed The Drowsy Chaperone in a smart, peppy style that shows off the talented company of Broadway pros. Cliff Bemis, as the producer Feldzieg, lends a big man's gracefulness to the dance number Toledo Surprise, which also features the gangster-pastry chefs, played by Paul and Peter Riopelle.
Vaudeville tradition informs the performances of Georgia Engel, playing the society matriarch Mrs. Tottendale, and Robert Dorfman's Underling (the butler). They even manage to work in a ukulele. James Moye chews up the scenery and spits it out as the Latin lover Aldolpho. Robert Billig conducts the orchestra in the bubbly score.
But for all the show's musical delights, what most sticks in the mind after the curtain falls is the memory of the Man in Chair, a sweetly touching figure as he escapes into his own little world of The Drowsy Chaperone.
John Fleming can be reached at fleming@sptimes.com or (727)893-8716.