Broadway Wakes Up

With a song in his heart: Bob Martin as Man in Chair in The Drowsy Chaperone. (Photo Joan Marcus/Bryan-Brown)

“I hate the theatre,” Man in Chair, the main character of The Drowsy Chaperone, tells the audience at the beginning of the play, just after the house lights have gone down. “Well, it’s so disappointing, isn’t it?”

He’s absolutely right, at least these days. First came Lestat, Elton John’s soulless vampire musical, and then Broadway rolled out The Wedding Singer, a stage adaptation whose most significant difference from the Adam Sandler movie is that it cannot be seen on airplanes. But the gold award for grimness goes to the chain e-mail put into circulation by the producers of Well, the one serious new play that managed to draw unalloyed effusion from critics: they’re begging friends to buy tickets to the show. Well may have received insanely good reviews, but it doesn’t offer a 1980s theme or a chance to see Julia Roberts onstage, and it’s a hair’s breadth from being axed.

So 42nd St. is in trouble, but now it has a fighting anthem. One of the most successful plays of the season, the Canadian import The Drowsy Chaperone, is a sugar-dusted paean to the transformative power of Broadway. The ironic musical focuses on a mousy, vaguely depressive Broadway fanatic whose coping mechanism involves listening to old stage recordings. Drowsy points to our need to be swept away, and at its best moments it feeds this selfsame hunger. No wonder the starving theatre-going masses are lapping it up. (It also just received 14 nominations for the New York Drama Desk Awards.)

A show within a show, Drowsy is a guided tour of a fictional 1928 musical called... The Drowsy Chaperone. Leading us through the framing play is Man in Chair (winsome Second City veteran Bob Martin), whose life is taupe and dreary except when he’s listening to his two-record set of the forgotten musical. A High Fidelity for the Cole Porter and Rodgers & Hammerstein crowd, Drowsy manages to simultaneously poke fun at campy old musicals and convincingly argue their case.

The show started out seven years ago, when Toronto artists Don McKellar, Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison created a spoof of old musicals for the stag party before the wedding of their theatre friends Bob Martin and Janet Van De Graaff. At first there was no role of Man in Chair for Martin to assume, the styles of songs ranged from the 1920s to the 1940s and the jokes were a bit dirtier. When the gang decided to reshape the show for the Toronto Fringe Festival, Martin jumped on board as a co-writer and they created Man in Chair to broaden the show’s reach. Over the subsequent years, they continued to tighten and rewrite the show as it made its way to Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille in 1999, its Winter Garden in 2002, Los Angeles last fall, and finally, New York’s Marquis Theatre.

Getting a leg up: Broadway cast members Angela Pupello, Sutton Foster, Patrick Wetzel and Jennifer Smith. (Photo Joan Marcus/Bryan-Brown)

When Man in Chair first turns on his record player and static breaks from the speakers, he wistfully tells the audience, “I love that sound. To me, that’s the sound of a time machine starting up.” By the time the first note sails out of his speakers, he’s already gone, swept up in his personal Xanadu. The actors in the recording enter Man’s apartment, and soon enough the dingy studio transforms into a delectable Broadway Candyland. Seashell footlights sprout from the ground, the kitchen island gives way to ornate furniture and out from the refrigerator and closet step a cast of 1920s actors in costumes that would put the Ice Capades to shame. With every passing song, the set grows more garish and dreamlike, complete with sparkly peacocks and glittery sugarplum trees.

The 1928 Drowsy Chaperone is a hodgepodge of goofy elements lifted from popular musicals of the Gatsby era (“when all the world was a party — for the wealthy anyway,” Man in Chair tells us). Its plot goes something like this: a vain showgirl named Janet (the talented, if treacly, ingenue Sutton Foster) is about to marry a man she only just met, and her cigar-chomping producer doesn’t want to lose his most valuable starlet to the world of Good Housekeeping. What follows is a pastiche of the most well-worn plot threads (a mistaken identity, spit-takes, gangsters on the lam!) and the requisite characters (the all-knowing English butler; the Latino Lothario; the daffy, cartwheeling heroine). Director-choreographer Casey Nicholaw (who won a Tony for his choreography in Spamalot) spares no hammy opportunities; the actors deliver their lines with the plucky smiles and exaggerated gestures that are, for the most part, relegated to live revue shows at Disney’s Magic Kingdom. There is no shortage of showboating or arm-flapping — and thank goodness for that.

Watching from his armchair, all wet-lipped and eyes aglow, Man in Chair is torn between the desire to watch the play and to insert his own personal footnotes. He continuously yanks the audience in and out of the fantasy. He starts out watching from his chair, but begins to move among the actors, dancing like a bunny rabbit, even singing along at the end. Of course, he knows his excitement is a bit far-fetched — he’ll step down from cloud nine to say in a knowing tone, “I hate this scene,” or, “You can see where this is going, can’t you?” And yet it’s all too apparent that if given the chance, he wouldn’t change a thing.

At the beginning of Drowsy, when Man in Chair grouses about the state of theatre, he claims that a play should be short, free of actors who mingle with the audience, and stocked with a story and a few good songs. Clocking in at 105 minutes, Drowsy nearly fulfills Man’s criteria, but doesn’t make it all the way through without slightly wobbling under the weight of its own self-consciousness. The play within the play, sweaty as it may be, is also, well, flat, with characters fit for the Cartoon Network and forgettable songs (the only line that sticks in my head is “keep your eyeball on the highball in your hand”). The cast members exude an aerobic enthusiasm, but with air quotes hanging over everything they say, they have a mighty steep hill to climb. The pastiche begins to strain under its limits, falling under its clever exoskeleton, and by the end, a piece of hilariously flimsy entertainment has all but handed itself over to a poignant meditation on hilariously flimsy entertainment.

The real highlight is Martin’s performance, which is as layered and complex as a honeycomb. There isn’t a moment when his enthusiasm lags, even when leading lady Foster hogs the spotlight doing splits or falling through trap doors. He handles his role with a sure touch, finding it impossible to watch the proceedings without bouncing on his cushion or trying to eat his fist. It’s a testament to Martin’s far-ranging talents that he manages to maintain an amusingly fey aspect while hinting at a darker rage lurking underneath. Pathetic as he may be, we can all relate to his frustrations when interruptions (a ringing telephone, a skip in the record) disrupt his reverie and pull him back to reality. A play, he tells us, “takes you to another world, gives you a little tune to carry in your head, something to help you escape the horror of the dreary world, a little something when you feel blue, you know?”

Let’s be honest here: it’s often the cheapest, flimsiest thrills that are the most transporting. Drowsy doesn’t necessarily have to be about theatre; its logic applies to any kind of wham-bam entertainment that sucks you in and spits you out somewhere you’d rather be. Man in Chair’s justifications can be used to explain any guilty pleasure — Wes Craven, Barbara Taylor Bradford, American Idol. Oh, if you must, even Elton John musicals.

The Drowsy Chaperone is now playing at New York’s Marquis Theatre.

Lauren Mechling is a New York writer. She co-wrote The Rise and Fall of a 10th Grade Social Climber. Its sequel, All Q, No A, is due out in June.

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