Sunday Showtunes

COMEDY TONIGHT

My hunger and ummm… other needs….satisfied, it was time for my first of 15 shows.  I could not have picked a better first show to see than “The Drowsy Chaperone.”  This is billed as “a musical within a comedy” and it’s a show for and about show people.  The plot is this:  a musical theatre devotee - read:  geek (about the same generation as I am) sits alone in his apartment (hey, I’m starting to feel uncomfortable here!) and, feeling blue, decides to “escape” by listening to the cast album of one of his favorite musicals, a show from the 1920’s with the typical title “The Drowsy Chaperone.”  The man, unnamed, talks directly to us, the audience, narrating the album for us as he plays each track – telling us details about the show and the actors in it.  As he does so, the show “comes to life” in his living room.   Throughout there are interruptions (the phone rings, the power goes out, he has to go pee) and occasionally the record skips or gets stuck and he has to repeat something.  The actors in the show-within-the-show have to do whatever the man plays, even if they get “stuck.” They never acknowledge the man.  They are all in his (and our) imagination.  The ingenious set mutates from the man’s gray apartment into all manner of colorful locales and settings for the show we see.  It’s all very clever.  

“The Drowsy Chaperone” was fun and a delight from beginning to end.  All the performances are wonderful, especially Bob Martin, who co-wrote the book and received a Tony for it as well as one for his performance as “The Man in the Chair”).  It is full of jokes about the form.  Scenes are described as having been written to cover scene changes – which explains how banal they are.  Overacting is justified.  Referring to a ditzy character, the man recounts that the actress herself was also stupid – “In those days, the theatre was one of the few places that stupid people could find work and get paid for it.  This was long before television, of course.”  There is not one but TWO swipes at Disney.  The man relates how much he hates intermissions, because they take you out of the show.   The show we are watching in fact has NO intermission (it’s only an hour and 45 minutes long by the way), and when the man gets to the end of Act I on the record (where there would normally be an intermission) he talks to us while he eats a Power Bar, explaining that he has “blood sugar issues.”   (Mr. Martin has to actually consume nearly an entire power bar at each performance, but I didn’t feel as sorry for him as I did for Troy Britton, who actually has to do a dance routine on roller skates – blindfolded!   Don’t ask me to explain).  The joke is that while we SHOULD be at intermission, we are just sitting there watching him eat and talk about how much he hates intermissions at shows, where you have to leave the wonderful fantasy and “mingle with tourists” while listening to them complain about the long lines at the women’s room.   Then he announces he has to go pee, and while he is gone he will put on the Entr’Acte of Act 2 for us to listen to!  At which point the entire cast begins a very strange and out-of-place (and seemingly very racist) Kabuki scene.  The man rushes in and takes the record off, explaining that his cleaning lady put the wrong record in the wrong sleeve!  It was another show (whose title I can’t remember).  The characters walk off, annoyed and disgusted, and as the man plays the correct record, the set returns to “The Drowsy Chaperone.”  Hilarious.   This was a wonderful wonderful show to start the week with.

KSHO broadcasts to the Mid-Willamette Valley in Western Oregon.
Among the communities served are Albany, Corvallis, and Lebanon.