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BROADWAY CHAPERONE
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Cheers for 'Jersey Boys'
and flawed 'Chaparone'
of TheColumnists.com
Fresh from a one-week,
six-show immersion in New York's Broadway theater, here’s
a report on two of the season’s major musical winners:
If it’s possible to both love and hate a new hit Tony-festooned
Broadway musical, I nominate for this conflicted honor “The
Drowsy Chaperone,” which is both a patronizing put-down
and an affectionate send-up, mirroring the confused state of
the Broadway musical itself.
All musical lovers desperately desire a return to its golden
age, or a contemporary facsimile, but the makers of modern versions
of those precious shows have no idea how to get there. “The
Drowsy Chaperone” pretends to celebrate those old shows,
which it often deftly imitates, but the show also crudely mocks
them, scoring points with condescending commentary for the musically
dense. It’s “The Boy Friend” with footnotes.
The show’s premise enticed me, as it has all true-blue lovers
of old musicals: an aging “musicals queen”--itself
a tiresome cliché--is visited by his favorite old show
from the 1920s, with the unlikely title (even for the `20s) of
“The Drowsy Chaperone.”
What’s genuinely likeable and admirable about the season’s
surprise smash musical is its premise and several of its individual
numbers from a score that is at times a brilliant pastiche of
shows like “Leave It to Jane,” “No, No, Nanette”
and “Best Foot Forward”--goofy plots with brilliant
songs and dances.
So even as the show’s superior attitude annoyed me, I look
forward to the CD, partly because I hope I won’t have to
endure the needless and obvious commentary that kept ruining
the show for me, to wit: “Well, there you have it. All the
characters have been introduced. We have a bride who’s giving
up the stage for love, her debonair bridegroom, a harried producer,
jovial gangsters posing as pastry chefs. A flaky chorine…Now,
you’re probably asking yourself, ‘Why was that routine
in the show?’ Well, it’s very simple: There’s
a song coming up, and they needed something to allow for a set
change. It’s mechanics.” And so on.
The musical’s savvy Canadian creators--songs by Lisa Lambert
and Greg Morrison, book by Bob Martin and Don McKellar--understand
the genre perfectly, and no doubt love it as I do, but they’ve
undercut their own show by inserting little jokes that attempt
to explain the built-in humor of the numbers, which need no such
crutch. The songs and dances are the joke, and all of those snarky
asides by the Man in Chair (our own aging drowsy chaperone) may
be amusing but somehow spoil the fun.
The brilliance of shows like “The Boyfriend,” “Dames
at Sea,” “Little Mary Sunshine” and the lesser
known “Curly McDimple” (a spoof of Shirley Temple movies)
and “The Student Gypsy (or the Prince of Leiderkrantz,”
is that they’re fully formed, perfectly conceived and elegantly
shaped satires unto themselves; no captions are required to get
the jokes. The foolishness is everywhere evident and fully understandable.
The maddening sidelines jabber by the omnipresent Man in Chair
amounts to periodic elbows in the rib to make sure we get the
joke, interrupting what might have been a sublime parody show
if the numbers had been strung together into a fleshed out plot
that we’re only told about by our wisecracking guide, who’s
amusing but redundant.
So why did “The Drowsy Chaperone” team feel obliged
to invent a guide to lead us through the show and point out the
“mechanics” of old musicals? Here’s where the
conflicted state of today’s Broadway musical enters, hat
in hand. The show’s creators, like the writers of such other
recent musical-mocking shows as “Urinetown,” “The
Musical of Musicals” and “[title of show],” feel
obliged to apologize for the show they’ve written, as if
to say, Hey, we realize this is all pretty stupid, because we’re
actually hip, but maybe you’ll like it anyway. This is called
having your hit and eating it alive too, and it’s a little
infuriating if you also love old musicals but realize, yes, they
can be pretty silly but you don’t care and accept them for
what they are without feeling ashamed or above it all.
“My One and Only,” which wove a clever `20’s period
parody around existing Gershwin songs, didn’t need a guide
to tell us where the silliness was, likewise the great Sondheim
pastiche songs in “Follies,” not to mention many of
the obscure old classics shows revived by the Goodspeed Opera
House, by San Francisco’s “42nd Street Moon” and
by New York’s own “Encores!” series. No audio
guides are necessary.
In many of those old shows, as it happens, the self-mockery is
slyly built in, in the writing and the staging. I’m thinking
of musicals like “Very Good Eddie” and “Crazy
for You,” in which the writers realized that audiences were
smart enough to know they were watching dumb plots without being
pounded over the head, as in “The Drowsy Chaperone.”
If only “Chaperone”’s writers had had the courage
of their confections and just written a full-blown send-up, a
deadpan genre parody, without feeling a need to tell us what
they were up to in ways that dilute their satire, disturb the
form and insult the audience. They don’t trust us to share
their playful vision. The reason, I suspect, is a fear that today’s
Broadway audiences might not understand the satire, which is
what made me crazy watching “The Drowsy Chaperone.”
We didn’t need to be told where to laugh.
Also, much as I loved infectious songs like “Cold Feets,”
“Show Off,” “As We Stumble Along” and “Love
Is Always Lovely in the End,” a few numbers are so over
the top that they flatten the otherwise catchy, pitch-perfect
takeoffs--like a number sung by the leading man on roller skates
wearing a blindfold (“Accident Waiting to Happen”)
and a crazed tango by the overheated Latin lover (“I Am
Adolpho”).
Too often in “The Drowsy Chaperone” it sounded as if
the audience was laughing not so much at the satire as at the
wild-and-crazy performances, which undercut subtle satirical
points with noisy farce--yet another way of poking us in the
side. Knowing, appreciative laughter was drowned out by mere
guffaws at this or that shtick.
If writers like the gifted “Drowsy Chaperone” team
want to concoct much-needed musicals that beguile audiences,
let them do it without any excuses. Those old shows, and their
modern counterparts, are their own reason to exist; no captions,
please. To celebrate this much-loved tradition, we musical freaks
don’t need any chaperones at the party.
I was pulling for
“The Jersey Boys” to win a Tony for Best Musical, but
after it did I felt pangs of guilt for deserting the classic
musical--which “The Drowsy Chaperone” celebrates--for
what is now called, disparagingly, a “jukebox musical.”
“Mamma Mia!” ushered in a flood of jukebox concerts
featuring the songs of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, The Beatles,
Janis Joplin, etc., but none has had the tingle of “The
Jersey Boys,” about the rise of Frankie Valli and the Four
Seasons.
To me, a teen with more elevated taste in the `60s (Frank Sinatra,
Margaret Whiting, Joni James), they were just another doo-wop
group, one of many now clinging to pop history on PBS fund-raisers.
But this show is so crisply and inventively staged, and the songs
so infectiously sung and arranged and played, that it’s
impossible to resist its modest but undeniably exuberant charm.
The show turned me into an instant fan of Frankie Valli, the
quiet, innocent, diminutive falsetto doo-wopper who got lost
in the Tony telecast shuffle (Valli got only a cursory nod) but
he’s the heart of the show as impersonated with sweet throbbing
vibrancy by John Lloyd Young, an unknown singer in his Broadway
debut.
Young, and the other three, rouse the crowd as in days of yore.
Little old ladies in front of me were swaying and clapping along,
giving vent to their inner teenager. If there were dancing in
the aisles of the theater, this would be the place for it. You
almost hate to leave, even after 20 songs--only two of which
I’d even heard of before, sad to say.
The show is framed with a bit too much theatrical razzmatazz--pop-art
comic book projections, a sort of schoolyard scaffolding--when
all it needs is the songs, but director Des MacAnuff has turned
the numbers into more than a static concert musical.
The story of the four Italian street-corner singers from Newark
has been told in stylized but semi-believable fashion in a narrative
by Marshall Brickman (onetime Woody Allen screenplay collaborator),
which gives the book gritty roots beyond nostalgia.
In the end, “Jersey Boys” is in the vivacious inventive
tradition of revues like “Ain’t Misbehavin’”
and “Smokey Joe’s Café.” It may not be
as smartly inspired as the satirical “Drowsy Chaperone”
but, as its Tony for best new musical reveals, “The Jersey
Boys” is a triumph of heart over head.
©2006 by Gerald Nachman. This column first posted June 19, 2006.
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