The Drowsy Chaperone

Friday night found me with a nearly unprecedented amount of time to kill coupled with a real fatigue of dicey theater. In any theater on any given night, you have a 50/50 change that things are going to go well. I wanted increased odds, so I made it my mission to get into The Drowsy Chaperone on my limited budget and see something that had many Tony nominations to its credit and would perchance please my tired, theater heart.

First, I went to the Southstreet Seaport to see if I could get a discount seat of some sort. Fortunately, TKTS did not have any more tickets for Friday night left and I had to go up to Times Square earlier than expected. I stopped by the box office first and learned about the $25 lottery. The front row did not sound so enticing, but $25 sounded better than full price and other offers of standing room or back row. Last Friday I would guess that about half of the people who entered the lottery got in (including me), just in case someone else finds that bit of information pertinent to their own situation.

The Drowsy Chaperone was magnificent for what I was looking for. It was super-professional, funny, a true song-and-dance musical (I think the dance portion of musicals is becoming rare), well acted, had a strong ensemble cast and provided excellent entertainment value. In addition to being a theater fan I love opera, so I found the voices to not be precisely what I would have deemed magnificent, but I am guessing too much opera listening can do that. Five years ago I may have found the voices great, too.

In a nutshell, this is a narrator musical. In this case, the narrator is introducing the audience to an old musical through an old vinyl recording in his city apartment. Anyone who has ever loved a recording of any album and replayed it until it nearly broke can relate to the loving way the narrator presents the show. Aware of its faults, and still loving it, he takes the audience through the show, providing “background information” on the performers involved in the recording as it comes alive in that area of his apartment we will call his living room. The narrative device in this instance works. It works so well, that one can not decide if the narrator or the musical is the star of the show.

Okay, I do have one complaint about the show. This comment has to do with current Broadway musicals in general. The narrator in the show alerts us to the fact that the Broadway musical is a cliché in its form, in its narrative structure and in its components. It seems that many good writers seem to be hitting against the same thing. Martin Short used the same subject matter in his recent self-titled show. And, there have been others, too. We seem to all agree that the Broadway musical form established so many years ago is worn out. And, yet, I feel like no one is proposing something new. Apparently, the plan right now is that we will just kick the old format until it is dead and not one more single dollar can be wrung from it. And, then from the dead carcass of the ol’ Broadway musical will come…? I don’t know. I don’t have the solution. But, how tired the Broadway show is, its clichés, its forms will only be funny for a little bit longer. Then, we will all have to jump from the cliff and actually try some new things out for awhile. This will probably lower our odds on good theater for a time, but at some point it is going to have to be a risk we will have to take as we are going to be hitting the last laugh on what may be a dying art form as we know it.