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music and lyrics by Linda Barnett, book by Chris Earle & Shari Hollett, directed by Timothy French

April 30th Entertainment, Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts, Richmond Hill

September 28-October 7, 2012

“A Hollow Crown”

For the world premiere of Queen for a Day: the Musical, April 30th Entertainment has assembled an absolutely top-notch Canadian cast and has found and ideal mid-sized venue in the attractive auditorium of the Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts.  All the company has failed to do is provide a show worthy of the talent it has gathered.  People under 50 will not have any direct experience of the sob-story competition disguised as a game show that ran on radio from 1945-1955 and on television from 1948-1964.  But the story of an ordinary woman appearing on a game show of any kind and winning provides far too little material for a two-and-a-half-hour-long musical.  The result is a musical where the entire second act, except for the contest outcome, is unnecessary and that has been loaded with more “meaning” than the simple structure can bear.

In order to give the antique game show some sort of relevance to a contemporary audience, the writers of the book, Chris Earle and Shari Hollett, have given the central story a frame.  In the frame we meet the Old Claribel (Denise Fergusson) who has been assigned a black teenaged offender sentenced to community service.  The particular service assigned to Felicia (Camille Eanga-Selenge) will be to help Old Claribel declutter her apartment to prevent her from being evicted for maintaining an unsanitary dwelling.  Rebellious streetwise teen meets feisty senior is the latest cliché to appear on stage and screen, probably because of the assumption that it will appeal to opposite ends of the age spectrum.  From too many previous examples, we know as soon as they’re introduced that despite their initial dislike they will wind up fast friends by the end.   

During her clearing out, Felicia comes upon all the relics of Claribel’s winning Queen for a Day that she has saved for 60 years.  This leads Old Claribel to tell Felicia her story and to draw the moral too many times that her win illustrates that favoured trope of old-fashioned musical comedies of “holding on to your dreams”. 

Scenes with Old Claribel and Felicia are intercut with flashes back to Hollywood in 1953.  The setting is Scully’s Gas and Diner where Young Claribel Anderson (Blythe Wilson), named for a real Queen for a Day winner, is a waitress.  When there’s no one to pump gas for a client, Claribel does it herself only to be chewed out by Scully (Sheldon Bergstrom) because that kind of job is a man’s work and is only done by women in communist countries like Russia.  We’re first introduced to Queen for a Day because it is the favourite show of head waitress Birdie McBride (Lisa Horner), who is also Scully’s main squeeze. 

Listening to the show makes new waitress and wannabe actress Lana (Marisa McIntyre) want to attend the next day so see if her wish for a screen test might be granted.  Claribel will go along.  While in line for the show, Claribel sees a white woman deliberately jump the queue to stand ahead of a black woman Esther (Angela Teek) and gets into a fight with the white women over the rights of coloured people.  Thus, the book writers manage to paint Claribel both as a feminist and as a fighter for civil rights ahead of her time.  Despite these advanced views, Claribel’s wish on the show is for a new truck for her husband Ned (Jay Davis), who has just quite his job, again, because his boss won’t give him a promotion.  This insecure man does not approve of Claribel working because it makes it look like he can’t provide for her and gives her another lecture on the passive role women should play in society.

Act 1 ends with us supposedly in suspense over who will win the contest (though the frame has already revealed it).  The problem for the writers, of course, is that once Claribel wins at the start of Act 2, there is nowhere for the show to go.  To fill up the next hour they manufacture a whole slew of meaningless plots.  As part of becoming “Queen for a Day”, Claribel is escorted by the show’s producer Dwight (Cory O’Brien) to the Coconut Grove with Lana in tow.  There movie star Shane Adams (Sean Hauk) is seen hugging Claribel and later Dwight is seen kissing her.  There are more complications, some far from funny, and eventually as in a 1930s comedy all the main characters, talking all at the same time, wind up in the office of Jack Bailey (Alan Thicke), host of Queen for a Day, who as an emcee ex machina solves all the pointless crises that have arisen.                

If the structure of the musical is severely flawed, so is its point of view.  The writers only view of Queen for a Day is that it can claim to be television’s first reality show.  What they completely ignore it that the show was reviled for exploiting and demeaning women.  The basis of the show is a competition among women for who has the worse tale of woe.  The “reality” aspect of the show was that the women typically broke down into tears while telling their tale and would break down again when one was crowned queen.  The studio audience voted via applause meter for the contestant who had the most pitiful story, thus pitting one woman’s pain against another.  The musical shows none of this.  There is no sense that appearing as a contestant is demeaning, that applauding for the saddest tale is inhumane or that the show, its sponsors and Jack Bailey are exploiting women’s sorrows for their own gain.  Thus, the progressive attitudes the writers give Claribel and the noncritical way they treat Jack Bailey don’t make sense.

Composer and lyricist Linda Barnett does capture the sound of popular music of the 1950s.  While most of her songs are simply unmemorable, some are downright awful.  The would-be hip-hop song “Don’t Need You” she gives Old Claribel and Felicia at the top of the show is embarrassing.  This white lady should just not try to sound black.  The two misogynist songs directed at Claribel – “Men Who Run the Show” and “My Own Man” –  are completely devoid of the irony that makes Henry Higgins’s “A Hymn to Him” (“Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man”) at least tolerable in My Fair Lady (1956).  “The Ukulele Samba”, led by Robert Yeretch as a kind of manic cross between Desi Arnaz and Speedy Gonzales, makes fun of Latino music in a series of cringeworthy clichés, and the song “The Kiss”, where Birdie tries to turn Claribel’s husband against her, is written as if it were funny when, in fact, it’s extremely mean-spirited and hypocritical.

The most memorable song is probably “One Wonderful Day”, referring to winning the contest.  The only problem is that it is memorable because the first ten notes are nearly the same as the Christmas song, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” made popular by the late Andy Williams in 1963.  At least the second-most memorable song, “Nothing Ordinary About You” is strong enough to be excerptable.

As for the singing and acting, everyone except for Alan Thicke is very strong.  Thicke seems to be saving his breath throughout his songs to have enough to blast out his final note and as for his acting he captures nothing of the unctuous style of Jack Bailey or other game show hosts of the 1950s.  It’s a shame to see someone as talented as Blythe Wilson invest so much energy in words and music that are often not even competent, but she always puts the best spin even on the worst material.  Lisa Horner’s forte is comedy and the audience showed willful blindness in taking everything she did as comic even when it patently was not.  Cory O’Brien is such a suave, likeable presence that one wished his role had been larger.  Angela Teek is given a poorly conceived song about being black in a white-dominated world but sings it with so much passion you just ignore the awkwardness of the lyrics.  Marisa McIntyre is a bubbly presence for a while, even if her character’s dream of becoming an actress is totally unbelievable, but when she becomes even bubblier in Act 2, she starts to outlast her welcome. 

No one will deny that staging a brand new Canadian musical on such a large scale is a quixotic endeavour.  The Drowsy Chaperone started out tiny and ultimately required an American director to discover how to make it stageworthy on a large scale and palatable to a non-Canadian audience.  So it’s a brave thing April 30th Entertainment has done.  One can only wish that someone less close to the project had simply pointed out its many flaws in fact, tone and structure – and that someone had listened – before the work got all the way to the stage.  The show Queen for a Day was just the first example of mass media exploiting and commodifying the American Dream, and by so doing, destroying whatever idealism it embodies.  By ignoring this essential aspect of the TV show, the musical automatically renders itself superficial and pointless.            

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Marisa McIntyre, Michael de Rose, Blythe Wilson and Cory O’Brien. ©2012 April 30th Entertainment.

For tickets, visit www.queenforadaythemusical.com.