cultured

The house lights dimmed, the curtain rose. Saw The Drowsy Chaperone at the Morris Performing Arts Center. The synopsis: The Man in Chair, a mousy, agoraphobic Broadway fanatic, seeking to cure his "non-specific sadness", listens to a recording of the fictional 1928 musical comedy, The Drowsy Chaperone. As he listens to this rare recording, he is transported into the musical. The characters appear in his dingy apartment, and it is transformed into a glorious Broadway set with seashell footlights, sparkling furniture, painted backdrops, and over the top costumes.

The plot of the show-within-a-show centers on Janet Vandegraff, a showgirl looking to give up the stage in order to marry an oil tycoon, Robert Martin. However, Janet is the star of "Feldzieg's Follies", and a lot of money is riding on her name to sell the show; and Feldzieg, her producer, is being threatened with bodily harm by two gangsters employed by his chief investor. Disguised as pastry chefs, these two pun-happy thugs threaten Feldzieg to stop the wedding, in order to ensure Janet's participation in the next production of Feldzieg's Follies. In order to save himself, Feldzieg enlists Aldolpho, a bumbling Latin Lothario, to seduce Janet and spoil her relationship with Robert. Meanwhile, Janet is having doubts about her groom. Disguising herself as a French woman, she tempts Robert into kissing her, and a massive misunderstanding emerges. What follows is a pastiche of every classic, clichéd plot thread ever to grace the stage, including mistaken identities, dream sequences, spit takes and the occasional deus ex machina, and involving such stock characters as an unflappable English butler, an absent-minded dowager, a ditzy chorine, a harried best man, and, last but certainly not least, Janet's "Drowsy" (read "Tipsy") Chaperone, played in the show-within-a-show by a blowzy Grande Dame of the Stage, specializing in "rousing anthems" and not above upstaging the occasional co-star.

Watching from his armchair, Man in Chair is torn between his desire to absorb every moment of the show as it unfolds and his need to insert his own personal footnotes and vast trivial knowledge, as he continuously brings the audience in and out of the fantasy. As the show goes on, more and more of his personal life is revealed through his musings about the show, until, as the record ends, he is left again alone in his apartment — but still with his record of a long-beloved show to turn to whenever he's blue.

The concept that the audience is listening to the musical on an old LP is used throughout the show. At one point, a skip on a record causes the last notes (and dance steps) of a song to be repeated until the Man in Chair can bump the turntable. A "power outage" near the end causes the stage to go dark in the middle of the big production number. Despite the show-within-the-show being a two act musical, 'The Drowsy Chaperone' is played without an intermission; at the end of the "show"'s first act, the Man in Chair observes that there would be an intermission if "we were sitting in a Theater, watching The Drowsy Chaperone. Which we're not." The monologue at the intermission of the musical ends with the Man in Chair changing records on the turntable and leaving to use the bathroom. The new record is actually the second act of a different musical by the same composer and librettist, starring many of the same actors. "Message from a Nightingale" is performed in costumes evoking Imperial China, with the performers displaying cliched Chinese accents and mannerisms. The Man in Chair returns to the stage and replaces the disc with the correct one for Act II of "The Drowsy Chaperone."

It was a very good production, enjoyed it very much.