The Drowsy Chaperone

Play with Music

Book by Bob Martin and Don McKellar
Music and Lyrics by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison

Speakeasy Stage Company
Boston Center for the Arts
Boston, MA

Directed and Choreographed by David Connolly
Music Direction by Nicholas James Connell
Scenic Design by Jenna McFarland Lord

May 6 – June 19, 2011

With Will McGarrahan (Man in Chair), Kerry A. Dowling (Mrs. Tottendale), Robert Saoud (Underling), David Christensen (Robert Martin), Brian Swasey (George), J.T. Turner (Feldzeig), Sarah Drake (Kitty), Ryan Halsaver (Gangster #1), Joe Longthorne (Gangster #2). Thomas Derrah (Adolpho), McCaela Donovan (Janet Van De Graff), Karen MacDonald (The Drowsy Chaperone), Nellanna (Trix), Rayn A. Anderson (Superintendent), Alison McCartan, Tiffany Chalothorn, Shawn Platzker, Michael Coup (Ensemble)

it begins in a totally dark theatre as a solitary voice rises up to deliver a short tale of woe. The lights come up and the speaker comes into focus. He’s a lonely man, sitting in a small and cluttered living room, and he tells us of his sadness and isolation. But he is, from childhood, a lover of musicals, and tends his soul with the comfort they bring. We never learn the name of this Man In Chair, played with an appropriate combination of neuroticism and enthusiasm by Will McGarrahan. But the passion of this anonymous protagonist inspires the contextualized evening that rolls out before us.

He brings from out of his record (yes, record!) collection, an artifact of his youth: The Drowsy Chaperone, a fictional classic from 1928. With the spin of the disc, the man’s claustrophobic living-room separates, the stage opens up, and the world of this musical confection comes alive before us.

The plot of the inner musical is pure essence of 1920s showbiz silliness. A star, Janet Van De Graff (played and sung with electric brilliance by McCaela Donovan), intends to leave the theater to get married to a tycoon. Her producer, Feldzeig (J.T. Turner) – manipulated by two gangsters (dressed, naturally, as chefs) – does everything he can to subvert her plan. He enlists an incompetent Lothario, Adolpho (played with grand Latin-lover foolishness by the American Repertory Theatre veteran and highly versatile Thomas Derrah) to lure Janet away from her betrothed. And endless epicycles of entertainingly inane complication spin out from this gravitas-less core.

McCaela Donovan as Janet Van De Graff. Photo: Stratton McCrady.

Surrounding this faux-dramatic hub is a cast of multiple additional faux romantiques. Complementing Adolpho is the character simply named The Drowsy Chaperone (played richly by another ART veteran, the earthy and vivid Karen MacDonald). Together they provide deep and broad laughs in their star-crossed attempts to tend and derail Janet Van De Graff and her ensuing marriage.

Thomas Derrah as Adolpho. Photo: Stratton McCrady.

The producer, Feldzeig, and his paramour Kitty (Sarah Drake) add to the connubial fun. And there are yet more: Mrs. Tottendale (Kerry A. Dowling), a society matron a la Margaret Dumont (the grand dame par excellence of many Marx Brothers films), and her butler (Robert Saoud), provide yet another dimension to the antics.

A friend once identified the musical Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well And Living In Paris – a compendium of ironic, angst-ridden ballads – as “showbiz Existentialism.”

The Drowsy Chaperone also fits into that category, but in a slightly different way. Whereas many of the lyrics in Jacques Brel are wrought by an existential hand, the lyrical content of The Drowsy Chaperone is – at least the inner core of it – pure fluff. But, here the tough shell of the play outside the musical is pure Existentialism. The fluffy innards frolic in stark contrast to the bleak exterior. In the end, it is the poignancy of the warmth such fluff offers to the life of the lonely protagonist that gives the weightless inner play some compensatory heft.

Karen MacDonald as The Drowsy Chaperone and Will McGarrahan as Man In Chair.
Photo: Stratton McCrady.

The current production is lively and entertaining, and it pulls off the added contextual flourishes: the skipping of the record, with the entire cast in the middle of a production number repeating in quick succession a set of gestures, and the pulling out of the record-player plug and the going down of the stage lights.

Will McGarrahan as Man In Chair. Photo: Stratton McCrady.

All in all it’s a lively evening, with enough sharp spice of isolation on the outside to make us dwell momentarily upon the contexts in which even silly pleasures play important roles.

– BADMan