“The Drowsy Chaperone” yawningly began its 12-performance run at the Fabulous Fox Theatre (527 N. Grand Blvd.) on Tuesday, Oct. 30-though the show is anything but lethargic.
Billing itself as “A Musical Within a Comedy,” the heartwarming, upbeat, witty premise is a unique one.
A nameless, theatre-obsessed hermit, identified only as Man in Chair, sits in his apartment and tells the audience about his recent melancholy and his disdain for the lack of heart in current Broadway musicals. He decides to play the soundtrack of a fictional hit musical from 1928, “The Drowsy Chaperone,” to lift himself out of his sullen depression. He says that musicals always pick up one’s spirits and this one, he promises, is particularly special.
Once he puts on the record-“Yes,” he said, “a record”-the musical comes to fruition around him in his apartment, ostensibly through his imagination.
The Tony Award-winning original musical is fairly basic, the type that you would find in the 1920s: A female vaudeville star (Andrea Chamberlain) wants to give up showbiz to get married, but her manager is determined to stop her. She is prohibited from seeing her fiancé because of bad luck, enforced by a drowsy chaperone (Nancy Opel), so-called because of the effect of champagne.
The show also features two gangsters posing as pastry chefs (Paul and Peter Riopelle), a dry, sarcastic butler named Underling (Robert Dorfman) and the clueless, sweet Mrs. Tottendale, played by Georgia Engel of “Mary Tyler Moore” fame.
The dialogue (Bob Martin and Don McKellar) and music (Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison) are written with a certain “hokey” quality that you would expect to find in a musical from the ’20s.
The charming music is catchy enough to be engaging, though the lyrics purposefully leave something to be desired. “Pay no attention to the lyrics,” Man in Chair warns the audience. If you have snoozed through enough musicals in your lifetime, particularly the old ones, you’ll see what the authors are driving at with their style.
The play really stands out with the clever interaction between musical’s performers and the apartment’s tenant, who watches from his chair for the majority of the play.
The musical technically takes place within his apartment, so certain parts of the apartment are always present and cleverly intertwined with the plot of the musical.
The proscenium of the theater is decorated as his apartment; the main door of the musical’s set is his refrigerator and all of the sets and scenery move on and off of the stage from the apartment’s hallways.
While the humor in the musical portion is corny and of a more slapstick variety, the tenant is dry and referential with his humor. He chimes in during breaks in the action, even going among the cast for certain moments. He also gives humorous background on the fictional actors that would have played these roles back in the ’20s, further hitting home his enthusiastic knowledge of musical theater.
There is no intermission in “The Drowsy Chaperone”; Man in Chair says that he hates intermissions because they take the audience out of the imaginary world created by the first half of a musical. In this case, the tenant himself invites the audience into his imaginary world.
From the stereotypical plot and characters, to the tenant pointing out the “B-plot” of the musical, to the fairly literal “deus ex machina,” the authors genuinely know musical theater and they show it off.
If you love or hate old musicals, or even if you don’t know the first thing about them, “The Drowsy Chaperone” is an entertaining experience for those who need to travel to another world for a night-a world where people break into song when life is wearing them down.
