✭✭✭✭✩

music and lyrics by Greg Morrison and Lisa Lambert,

book by Bob Martin and Don McKellar,

directed by Casey Nicholaw

Dancap Productions, Elgin Theatre, Toronto

September 23-October 14, 2007

The Drowsy Chaperone, the 1999 Fringe Festival hit that turned into a 2006 Tony Award-winning musical, is back in town and inaugurates Dancap Productions as a challenge to Mirvish.  This is the show that has had producers prowling the Fringe in search of the next “Drowsy”, though so far no Canadian musical has had so much success in New York even if it was not crowned “Best Musical”.  As has now become legend, what began in 1998 as a wedding gift from Greg Morrison and Lisa Lambert to Bob Martin and his fiancée was reworked for the Fringe, transferred for a run at Theatre Passe Muraille and was reworked again in 2001 for a run at the Winter Garden Theatre for Mirvish Productions.  In the end it took American producers and American director Casey Nicholaw to ask for major cuts and rewrites to make the small-scale show work on a big stage.

What has not changed is the genial presence of Bob Martin as the Man in Chair, the frowsy, fanatical but self-deprecating lover of old musicals, who one day decides to drive away the blues by playing an LP of his favourite show The Drowsy Chaperone, supposedly written in 1928.  As he explains the silly plot and gives us inane footnotes on the original performers, the musical comes to life in his depressing basement apartment.  Where the new production succeeds magnificently over the old is in David Gallo’s gradual, wildly inventive transformation of this apartment into numerous, increasingly fabulous locales in the musical.  Gregg Barnes’s continual costumes changes fill the stage with colour and as does Nicholaw’s lively choreography with movement.

Now the show is more exuberant and more theatrical and calls greater attention to very flimsiness of the artifice it seems to celebrate.  On the minus side, fans of the show’s previous incarnations will miss many of the eight songs that have been cut.  Though the musical and dance aspects of the show have been beefed up, somehow the relation of theatre mogul Feldzieg (Cliff Bemis) and the ditzy showgirl Kitty (Marla Mindelle) is not as funny as it was and neither are the two gangsters (Paul and Peter Riopelle).  All the business between Mrs. Tottendale (Georgia Engel) and her servant Underling (Robert Dorfman) that the Man in Chair claims is boring actually is boring.  Now the show ends with a twist that some may find unnecessary or saccharine.  On the plus side, we learn more of the pitiful life of the Man in Chair.  “Show Off” for Follies star Janet Van De Graaf, stays in as the show’s best tune and is given a tremendous performance by Andrea Chamberlain.  The Drowsy Chaperone herself now has a much better signature song, “As We Stumble Along”, that Nancy Opel delivers as if she were the alcoholic Judy Garland of the 1920s.  Tap dance livens up the rather dull bridegroom Robert Martin (Mark Ledbetter) as does the addition of a big, loony mid-show dance number “Toldeo Surprise”.

Nevertheless, The Drowsy Chaperone remains a peculiar musical where the book and now the production are more interesting than the music.  In fact, this “musical within a comedy”, as the subtitle puts it, succeeds solely because of the Man in Chair’s commentary that both knowingly and unknowingly satirizes the devotion of the musical fan along with the history and conventions of the genre he loves.  Bob Martin is so ideal as this self-defensive yet hopelessly romantic nerd it’s hard to imagine how anyone could replace him.  We are lucky.  In this the launch of the musical’s 30-city tour, only Toronto will have Martin in his chair.              

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2007-09-24.

Photo: Bob Martin. ©Joan Marcus.