Light-hearted, tuneful and no more substantial than a cumulus cloud, the Stages St. Louis production of "The Drowsy Chaperone" offers a delightful evening of entertainment while it provides both those who love musical theater and those who hate it with enough additional cement to harden their positions for eternity. It runs through Aug. 16 at the Robert Reim Theatre in Kirkwood.
The musical within a musical, which also serves to spoof and honor all musicals, both stage and screen, offers fine singing and dancing throughout the cast, which runs alphabetically from Baxter (Michael) as a Marx Brother-style gangster to Vonder Haar (Zoe) as an aviatrix modeled after the pilot in "Flying Down to Rio."
But the pivotal work comes from David Schmittou, one of Stages’s regular leading men, and he’s solid. He begins as a disembodied voice, coming out of the dark and telling us he hopes the show will be short. When the lights come up, he’s Man in Chair, in a Mister Rogers-style cardigan, huddled over an old-fashioned record player. Obviously and proudly a Broadway Show Queen, a position and a preference he emphasizes, he talks about the musicals of the ‘20s and ‘30s, when the plot served merely to introduce the songs and also to separate them, and slowly the stage comes to life around him, with a strong set of funny stereotypes.
Schmittou seems to spend less time in the chair, and more in the action, than I recall from other productions, and it bothered me, but that’s a minor caveat because he makes a wonderful host, bringing us into his studio apartment, his life and times and hopes and dreams.
We open on a wedding day, with Tari Kelly as Janet Van de Graaff about to leave show business to marry Robert Martin (David Elder), with love’s course lubricated when she learns of his family’s oil wells. Her producer, Feldzeig (Ed Romanoff) needs her in his show because he owes a lot of money to some gangster who has dispatched a couple of singing and dancing thugs, posing as bakers, to collect the debt. Baxter and Ben Nordstrom are brilliant, and the script reaches its high point–some will say its low point–with their wonderful collection of bakery puns. It may not be Lent, but the Hot Cross Puns are in full flour, much like the Cole Porter lyrics in "Brush Up Your Shakespeare" from "Kiss Me, Kate." Martin and Brian Ogilvie, as George, the best man, turn out a terrific tap-dance number and help carry the action nicely.
Keeping with the authors’ aim, we also have a classic Latin lover, Aldolpho, played with show-stopping skill by Edward Juvier, dressed to the tens (he’s too far overboard for the nines). He’s superb, and somehow becomes matched with the title character, played with sensual, slithery splendor by Christianne Tisdale as a woman who obviously has explored and enjoyed all the many pleasures a bed can bring.
More?
Well, two more. Kari Ely, always charming, is Mrs. Tottendale, the hostess (don’t ask why, please) for the wedding, right out of a Beatrice Lille or Billie Burke characterization, and she has a straight-faced butler, known as Underling and played gloriously by John Alban Coughlan in the style of Arthur Treacher or Franklin Pangborn.
Watching all these references to shows, movies and performers I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing over the last half-century makes "The Drowsy Chaperone" a pleasure for me. Schmittou handles the introductions for everyone else in the audience, and does it very well.
A production of Stages St. Louis, at the Robert Reim Theatre through Aug. 16.
-Joe