Review: `The Drowsy Chaperone’
Opened July 23, 2008 at the Orpheum Theatre
The cast of The Drowsy Chaperone joins stage star Janet Van De Graaff (Andrea Chamberlain, center, leg in air) in the show stopper “Show Off.” The Tony Award-winning musical is at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco. Photos by Joan Marcus
Shadows hover over daffy, delightful `Drowsy’
««« ½
Musicals don’t come much sweeter than The Drowsy Chaperone.
The little Canadian musical that began life as a wedding present and then blossomed in to a 2006 Tony Award-winning hit is on the road and is now at San Francisco’s Orpheum Theatre as part of the SHN/Best of Broadway season.
For a frothy musical, it’s fairly high concept. A nameless man in a chair (a completely charming Jonathan Crombie, below) attempts to stave of his miserable life for a while by listening to a favorite original cast album.
“I hate the theater,” he mutters in the darkness as the show begins. He then proceeds to tell us how modern musicals are dull and dreary and overblown and that his greatest pleasure in life has been from gorgeous, silly musicals of yore. To make his point, he pulls out some classic vinyl: the 1928 score for Gable and Stein’s The Drowsy Chaperone starring Jane Roberts, the “Oops Girl” and venerable British actress Beatrice Stockwell before she was made a dame.
It’s a complete fiction, of course, invented for the purposes of this musical, but the fake show’s authenticity is half the fun as it begins to unspool in the man’s dingy studio apartment with ongoing commentary from the man, who is in musical theater heaven while the music plays, and only occasional interruptions from the ghastly real world.
Crafted in vintage ‘28 style, the musical numbers of The Drowsy Chaperone, with music and lyrics by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison, are light and airy, funny and forgettable – in other words, just right. As the Man in the Chair says, musicals should help one “escape the dreary horrors of the real world.” And this is a musical that does…to a point.
While the silliness of “Drowsy” trills and tap dances along its merry way, book writers Bob Martin and Don McKellar (two of the brains behind the brilliant Canadian TV series “Slings and Arrows”) sneak in some welcome depth through the character of the Man in the Chair. That’s not to say this is heavy going, but this is mindless entertainment with a mind.
To Read the full review, visit my www.Examiner.com site here.
Here’s a little taste of Drowsy Chaperone: