Show Me the Drama
It's been a season that's included cannibalism, torture, depression, sickness and, of course, death. Sound cheerful? When the city's theaters weren't exploring those delightful themes, they played host to an impressive run of movie and TV actors that added an extra punch to sagging box offices. But it turns out that it's the classic musical comedy, Drowsy Chaperone, that really turns audiences on. With all the expectation surrounding this year's Tony Awards (How many Irish can win? Who can top Jayne Houdyshell's performance in Well?), we can't stop and ignore the great shows (big and small) that continue. Pig farmers and shirtless soap stars: seems the fun isn't about to stop.
A somewhat subdued theater queen, he warns us from the outset that he has grown to hate attending the theater, adding his dread for actors crawling around the audience and disdain for intermissions-"one moment you're in a glamorous world of music and romance and bang you're surrounded by a room full of tourists."
The actor who portrays "Man in Chair" is also the play's author and infuses his role with omniscience, crossing the imaginary boundary between the actors and audience with delightful finesse. He brings down the curtain in time to answer his cell phone, "Hi. I'm in the theater ruining the moment."
Hardly the case! Not a moment of Bob Martin and Don McKellar's 90-minute musical is ruined, even though the plot it evokes is about the show that won't go on.
That show, the titular Chaperone is an imitation of a B-plot musical from the '20s. In it, the real life Sutton Foster portrays starlet Janet Van De Graaff, who wants to get married despite her producer's ploys to keep her in the show.
The musical itself is broadly played, a camp confection with Sutton Foster singing lyrics like "I don't wanna showoff." The tunes are self-mocking and light hearted, a far cry from the melodramatic tunes of Elton John or Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals. Meanwhile Foster kicks up a storm, turning somersaults, doing splits and 90-degree leg lifts. To watch her one would think she has the easiest job on Broadway; that's how thoroughly at home she is onstage alongside Bob Martin, a.k.a. "Man in Chair."
Clearly, the charm of this production is its endearing theatrical framework. As "Man in Chair" chats with us about his favorite musical, the characters appear before our eyes, the sets transform and the story unfolds. After a while Chaperone is just too adorable. Its most innovative device is recreating the musical comedy of old; a form that's lost its footing, but not it's romantic lure. (Isa Goldberg)
The idea to write the comedy first came to Kotis in '92 after reading accounts of rivers flooding Confined Animal Feeding Operations in North Carolina in the wake of Hurricane Floyd. "All the animals drowned," he explains. "But not only that: The river overflowed the slurry lagoons where the animal waste goes. There was this apocalyptic event of tens of thousands of animal carcasses and their waste flowing down the river. It was just a horrific image."
The play's corollary fictional reality is waste management problems arising from overpopulated pig farms. Farmers dump fecal pig sludge waste into the Potomac River. The E.P.A. sends Teddy (Denis O'Hare) and other federal agents (humorously named Trevor, Tyler, Tully and Theo) to count pigs on each farm. If the pig farmers' count vouchers don't match the feds' tally, then the farmers could lose their farms. It's this double-edged sword of governmental protection versus intrusion on individual privacy that drives home Kotis' gallows humor and satire of governmental distance from the realities of farm life.
The above-mentioned marital tension between Tom and Tina centers on her desire for a child. Tom's assistant, Tim (Logan Marshall Green), a boy who has served time in juvie for offense to minors, becomes romantically involved with Tina. He also clandestinely steals Tom's pigs and sells them to Tony, whose farm faces repossession by the government due to his failure to offer an accurate pig count to the E.P.A. In Pig Farm Kotis spoofs our faith in American archetypal myths of manhood and personal freedom.
"Freedom is a basic yearning to come into your own," he says. "It's just a basic element of the American character to rest your destiny. It's the setting for a devastating domestic drama." (Robert Hicks)
The good news is you'll be glad you came. The handsome decor by David Korins drops our two hands-Caulfield and his spinster bride-on their honeymoon into a glistening, black-bricked set, replete with flickering gas lamps.
Mousy Adelaide-played ably by Amelia Campbell-doesn't know why Love has come to town, she's just grateful he's arrived. The lover in question is George Joseph Love (Caulfield), Adelaide's handsome suitor who appears outside the millinery where she works to present a bouquet of flowers and an impromptu wedding proposal. Looking like a turn of the century, buffed-up David Bowie, Love confesses-in one of this show's many effective asides-that when it comes to the ladies, he "likes to leave 'em gawking." And gawk they do. Not just Adelaide, but the audience, too.
One of the first nudities Tryst presents is a posterior view of Caulfield's naked torso, and that's before you even enter the theater. The show delivers on the poster's promise in the first scene. Fans of Caulfield-who's graced the stage au natural so many times die-hards debate house left or house right before booking tickets-will not be disappointed. But true to this crafty narrative's dark little heart, it's not Caulfield who goes Full Monty in the end.
It's Adelaide, who in the second act, sheds not only her frumpy brown, period wedding ensemble, but also her clueless routine that would have her as gas-lamped as the set. Adelaide knows the score, and is such a Cosmo-girl-rising she turns the tables on Love with pop psychology yet to be born. Tryst-like a good British cozy-lulls its audience with a soothing cup of tea that turns out to be piping hot. (Tony Phillips)