The Drowsy Chaperone - Original Broadway Cast Recording & [title of show] - Original Off-Broadway Cast Recording
Now Available
You will, I hope, agree that cute is good, but cutesy is bad. Cute is a baby, a puppy, the way boy meets girl in a movie. Cutesy is a woman of 70 with hairdo and attire befitting 17, a high fashion boutique for tots, or mature spouses spouting baby talk.
Cutesy are two currently successful musicals I find seriously wanting (the only thing serious about them): The Drowsy Chaperone and [title of show]. Why should such musical comedies be serious? Because, like nonmusical comedies if they are any good, they should have something to say about human beings, about life, amid the laughs. They should contain something universal that, translated, speaks to every part of the civilized world.
Not so The Drowsy Chaperone and the bracketed, lowercase [title of show] (both now available on CD courtesy of Ghostlight Records). These are cutesy artifacts that might have been largely ignored if either the theater or the audience had higher standards. They probably owe their success to the current rarity of works of genuine talent—I exempt, of course, those by Stephen Sondheim, Adam Guettel, and one or two others.
Another explanation is the prevalence of show queens in today's audience. These prefer camp to reality, laugh so loud and long at jokes that the show's rhythm is ruptured and we can't hear the next line or two. They contribute heavily to indiscriminate standing ovations and to whooping it up as if applause were not enough.
But don't get me wrong. We need show queens, without whom our overpriced theater would be in sorry shape. And they do not have exclusively camp tastes; they like the worthy The Light in the Piazza almost as much as the unworthy Wicked and Spamalot.
So what, in my view, is so bad about Chaperone and [title], which, in view of its hollowness should really be abbreviated as [ ]? (The latter, by the way, is according to The New York Times "an absolute must for show queens.") They are silly, self-indulgent, self-serving, irrelevant, and inordinately in-joke-riddled. They drop names at the drop of a hat, pandering to the audience by deluding them into believing that catching facile allusions is proof of sophistication, and disburse specious inside information—the theatrical equivalent of insider trading.
Thus [title] is about two guys assisted by two friendly gals trying to write a musical due in three weeks' time for a competition. They have no idea, as they keep telling each other, about what; so they decide to record their quandary and make a musical about the lack of idea for one. (This is the sort of thing that only a genius like Fellini could manage.) The four characters, who are also the four perpetrators, are perfectly charmless, and there is no melody—the onstage pianist seems to be merely vamping—and the strictly-from-hunger dialogue comprises things[IMG:R] like listing every musical with "Oh" in its title or repeating "Monkeys, Playbills" or, by way of variety, "Monkeys and Playbills," ten times.
In the end, preposterously, the musical gets written and into the contest. This thanks to such desperate devices as a song in which "Rather be nine people's/ Favorite thing, than a hundred people's ninth-favorite thing" is reiterated eleven times, and the word "Meow" 28 times, interspersed with several "title of show"s. We also get the repeated delusion that "four chairs and a keyboard can make a musical." But still no genuine tune.
As for Chaperone, it consists of an arrantly errant show queen (played fulsomely by the co-author Bob Martin) recalling a fictional 1928 musical, The Drowsy Chaperone, while playing the original cast LP. (Such a trashy musical, even if it existed, would not have been recorded on an LP even if LPs had then existed.) Whereupon the cast of Drowsy emerges from Bob's fridge and performs that show, with Bob getting ecstatically entangled in the proceedings. He revels in what he describes as "two-dimensional characters" and the "well-worn plot." So we get a brash parody within a brazen framing story. There is one good number; the rest is, at best, mediocrity in word and music.
The nadir is reached when a lady and her butler indulge in a kind of spitting duel, each spouting a swallow of his or her drink into the other's face. Otherwise, the plot chronicles three fraught weddings until a biplane lands—none too soon—on the stage and carries the cast off to an exotic honeymoon. The show's title has to do with the main bride's chaperone, a woman who is sozzled; in Canada, where the show originated as a joke, "drowsy" means crapulous.
What the two shows have in common, besides abjectness, is having a show within a show: the one about nothing, the other about a lousy (not drowsy) old musical. Well, Chaperone at least has, for the most part, a decent professional cast and a terrific leading lady in Sutton Foster, who even performs prodigious acrobatic feats. On the CD, without visuals, this is missing, constituting a loss within a loss.