![]() ![]() The themes of The Drowsy Chaperone include the joy and comfort a musical brings to people. It takes the fun and spectacle to the next level. There’s a lot of glitz and glamour to look at. ![]() The Jazz Age was one of the best eras for fashion. ![]() The Drowsy Chaperone delivers on that front. As silly as the characters can be – especially when carrying oversized pastry bags or dressed in 1920s bathing suits – you never forget they are in the business of “chopping nuts” and “pounding dough.” Have I mentioned the double entendres?Ĭostuming is crucial, with most of the action-taking place amongst the upper crust of the Jazz Age. They do a good job maintaining an undertone of menace about them. ![]() Munck and Desmond are hilarious in the roles. Gangster #1 and Gangster #2 are gangsters in the mold of the gangsters from Kiss Me Kate and Bullets Over Broadway. Tottendale (Arabella Chrastina), and they make a fine comic duo. He’s so poised, even under the silliest of circumstances. He is a butler, so he’s British, has a stiff upper lip, and is snarky. I got more thrills from Rice’s skating than from the CGI slugfests of today’s blockbusters.īrenner Farr plays Underling. In addition to tap dancing, Rice rollerskates – blindfolded. Landers cartwheels and does the splits in heels. The physical stunts they pull off are impressive. They’re all triple threats: they sing well, they act well, and they dance well. “Toledo Surprise” is delicious from beginning to end. The emotion behind them is real even when they’re lyrically ridiculous – “Bride’s Lament” and “Love is Always Lovely in the End,” for instance. The musical numbers are engaging and energetic from both musical and performance standpoints. I didn’t realize how much I missed it until I saw Rice and Cam Burchard, who plays George, tap dance their way through “Cold Feets.” It has been a while since I’ve seen a musical with tap dancing. Two gangsters (Elijah Munck as Gangster #1 and Luke Desmond as Gangster #2) are disguised as pastry chefs and possess a never-ending supply of baked good puns. There is a lot to love about The Drowsy Chaperone. By acknowledging the stock characters, the contrived plot, and the lowbrow humor intended as filler upfront, the show gives the audience license to sit back and unapologetically enjoy the spectacle in front of us. The Man In Chair’s running commentary skewering The Drowsy Chaperone’s (intentionally built-in) flaws is necessary because a throwback show as it played straight today wouldn’t fly. As the Man In Chair listens to the record and provides commentary, he brings this screwball, Jazz Age comedy about the wedding day of oil tycoon Robert Martin (Logan Rice) and Broadway star Janet Van de Graaff (Rezia Landers) and the misadventures they and their attendees get into to life. To cheer himself up, he plays the cast recording of his favorite musical, The Drowsy Chaperone. He’s a fourth-wall-breaking theater fan and, in his words, is feeling blue. It starts with Man In Chair (Adam Milana Castrillón). Cold, rainy, and windy as it was outside, everything was red hot on stage. It was a dark and stormy night, but I ventured forth to the Lyceum Theater to see The Drowsy Chaperone. Turns out she has a good reason: she was actually raised in an orphanage there for a short while before being adopted by kindly midwestern farmers, and now wants to find her birth parents.(photo credit: vanguard uni) Written by Daniella Litvak When she hears that local pianist Myra Brooks (Victoria Hill) is in search of a chaperone to accompany her precocious but exceedingly talented teenage daughter Louise (Haley Lu Richardson) to New York to attend a prestigious dance school, Norma mysteriously jumps at the chance. When first met in 1922 in Wichita, Kansas, Norma seems like a nice, churchgoing lady of a certain age, respectably married to a lawyer (Campbell Scott) and mother of two practically grownup sons. Here, that parallax view is from the perspective of Norma – played by Lady Grantham herself, Elizabeth McGovern, taking a lead role for a change. Like so much of Fellowes’ work, it effectively flatters the viewer by assuming he or she must be familiar with certain historical figures (in this case, early cinema star Louise Brooks) and then appears to dish the dirt on them through the eyes of a character from another class or at least different social sphere. Written by Julian Fellowes, who brought us Downton Abbey and recent series The Gilded Age, and directed by Michael Engler, who worked on both the aforementioned, this based-extremely-loosely-on-fact costume drama adapted from a novel by Laura Moriarty should hit the sweet spot for fans of Fellowes’ particular variety of saucy-soapy period pieces. ![]()
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