The Marvelous Wonderettes - Original Off-Broadway Cast Recording

[IMG:L]P.S. Classics
Available Nov. 11

Was 1958 only half a century ago? It could easily have been more: what innocence, naivete, simplicity! The memory musical The Marvelous Wonderettes, about a fictional girl group, begins with the Senior Prom at Springfield High, which could be anywhere in America. This at a time when the entire country still had, or could pretend to have, simplicity, naivete, innocence.

In Seattle, Roger Bean and his mother would put together church shows consisting of pirated pop songs with lyrics changed to suit the occasion. Much later, Mom told Roger about how she had been a “song leader” in high school, which made him wonder about what that was like.

Out of these givens, Bean felt he could make an omnium gatherum musical, this time round not even having to change the extant lyrics. The trick was merely to find the songs and weave them together into a story. This he did, turning it into the tale of four girls, best friends until the somewhat fraught 1958 prom, and again at their tenth reunion at the 1968 prom.

The show’s first act is all about dreams, about boys or teachers one had guileless crushes on, and also the occasional betrayal—stealing a boyfriend—followed by a partial reconciliation and songs, many songs to be sung as part of the prom and expressing part of graduating lives. So it goes on tracks 1 through 11; with 12 through 27 comes the tenth reunion at Springfield High. Old friendships are renewed, old animosities rekindled, and final pacification ardently arrived at. Above all, we get a sense of the grown girls’ differing existences.

Cindy Lou Huffington, the beautiful, sexy heartbreaker, has failed in Hollywood, and now has a changed life with Billy Ray, leader of the old high-school band, the Crooning Crabcakes. Betty Jean Reynolds, her former betrayed rival, has married the old boyfriend, only to have her marriage misfire. Missy Miller, the plain but faithful one, after years of trying and hoping in vain, gets a surprising onstage proposal from her guy. Suzy Simpson, the blonde cutie-pie, is pregnant by Richie (who now as then runs the lights for the show), a husband who cheats on her, for which the other Wonderettes offer comradely consolation.

Roger Bean has provided an amiable scenario, and adroitly picked songs that smoothly blend together to advance the story. The quartet (given witty bios by Bean in the booklet) is cunningly impersonated by the performers—Farah Alvin (Missie), Beth Malone (Betty Jean), Bets Malone (Suzy) and Victoria Matlock (Cindy Lou)—forming a wonderful cross section of American girl- and womanhood.

[IMG:L]Matlock is a genuine raven-haired looker; Beth Malone, a typical American sweetheart; Bets Malone, a golden-haired princess with baby-doll voice; and Alvin, a cozily homely, mandatorily bespectacled good girl. Their voices blend or contrast to excellent effect, and are backed up by a no less felicitous quartet of musicians: Michael Borth and Brandon Sturiale on keyboards, Danny Taylor on drums and Neal Johnson on guitar.

Greatly abetting the wonder of the Wonderettes are the savvy musical arrangements by Brian William Baker, orchestrations by Borth, and vocal arrangements by Baker and Bean. But what about the songs themselves?

Smartly selected, they are not the obvious golden oldies that would hoggingly disrupt the flow—only “Goodnight, Sweetheart, Goodnight” and maybe “Leader of the Pack” might qualify as such. The rest, though made of somewhat baser metal than gold (one exception coming up), are vividly gilded by the orchestrations and arrangements, and springing to original, but not too original, new life at Springfield High. The abovementioned exception, “Born Too Late” by Charles Strouse and Fred Tobias, should take everyone by sweet surprise.

The Marvelous Wonderettes is still running at the Westside Theatre, but if you can’t see it, the original-cast CD will go a very long way to compensate for that. The music recalls an age when ingenuousness beat out ingenuity, sweetness won out over sexiness, and all was, or seemed to be, all right with the world.