The Drowsy Chaperone
September 16 - October 2, 2011

FROM BACHELOR PARTY TO BROADWAY: THE INCREDIBLE STORY OF “THE DROWSY CHAPERONE”

By Kristi Casey Sanders, Encore Atlanta © 2008

The Drowsy Chaperone won more Tony Awards than any other musical of the 2006 season, including Best Book (Bob Martin and Don McKellar), Original Score (Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison), Costume Design (Gregg Barnes) and Scenic Design (David Gallo). But very few people realize the most celebrated musical of 2006 began as a bachelor party skit.

“All of us … who were with the show from its creation, we were all friends from way back,” says Tony Award-winning composer and lyricist Lisa Lambert. “Some of us were in high school together: Bob Martin and Don McKellar and I. In 1998, Bob was getting married and I was his best man, so I felt responsible for putting together his bachelor party. And, I thought it would be fun if we could present this little piece that we’d been kicking around for a while.”

Growing up, the friends had bonded over Marx Brothers and Fred Astaire movies. “There was a whole gang of us who did a series of pastiche shows with strange narrative devices,” Lambert remembers. Occasionally, the comedians would bounce around ideas for a silly 1920's-type musical. “We had the title, The Drowsy Chaperone, and we had some song titles.”

Lambert hooked up with Martin’s friend Greg Morrison, the musical director at Toronto’s Second City, and began putting words and music to titles such as “Accident Waiting to Happen,” which came from a sketch show Lambert had done with Martin, Jonathan Crowley and Paul O’Sullivan years before. Because their friends were getting married, they set the musical at a wedding. “Which is kind of where all the 1920's musicals are set,” Lambert explains. “And we named the lead characters after the bride and groom. The thought was, ‘Let's please our friends by actually finishing this thing’ … and we had a good time.”

They had such a good time they applied for a performance berth at the 1999 Toronto Fringe Festival. “We got in … and we decided to make it more than a pastiche, so we added the Man in Chair character (played by newlywed Bob Martin),” Lambert says.

The play now had a narrative device, a lonely man who compulsively listens to the 1920's musical in order to feel better about his life. It was the sleeper hit of the festival, and was seen by the Mirvish Company, a Broadway touring show presenter. What followed, Lambert says, was surreal. “Every time we did the show, we thought it was the final time we’d do it, but (the show) would keep jumping to the next level. It took us completely by surprise.” The Mirvish Company put the show in its regular season at the Winter Garden Theatre, where it had a successful commercial run. Then, it made its U.S. debut at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, ultimately transferring to Broadway.

Along the way, the show changed a lot. “When Casey Nicholaw, who choreographed and directed the Broadway version, came on board, he worked a lot with us on the script, and did a lot to enhance the music, and redid the casting for more musical theater people, because we had to,” Lambert says. “When it came to the States, we had to go with the triple threats.” Of the show's early cast, only Bob Martin appeared on Broadway. And, only two of the bachelor party's songs made the final cut: “Accident Waiting to Happen” and “I Am Adolpho.”

May 2, 2006
THEATER REVIEW | “THE DROWSY CHAPERONE”
Nostalgic ‘Drowsy Chaperone’ Opens on Broadway
By Ben Brantley, © The New York Times

The gods of timing, who are just as crucial to success in show business as mere talent is, have smiled brightly upon "The Drowsy Chaperone," the small and ingratiating musical that opened last night at the big and intimidating Marquis Theater. Though this revved-up spoof of a 1920's song-and-dance frolic, as imagined by an obsessive 21st-century show queen, seems poised to become the sleeper of the Broadway season, it is not any kind of a masterpiece.

Without its ingenious narrative framework and two entrancing performances — by Bob Martin as a lonely, musical-loving schlemiel with a hyperactive fantasy life and Sutton Foster as the showgirl heroine of his dreams — "The Drowsy Chaperone" would feel at best like a festive entree at a high-end suburban dinner theater.

But try telling that to the theatergoers who are responding to this hardworking production as if they were withering house plants that, after weeks of neglect, have finally tasted water again. "The Drowsy Chaperone," which has songs by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison and a book by Mr. Martin and Don McKellar, arrives at a moment when Broadway audiences have been battered, bruised and bludgeoned to sleep by blunt instruments of shows like "Ring of Fire" and "Lestat."

And now here is a musical that frankly sets itself up as a short (1 hour 40 minutes), happy exercise in escapism, adorned with just enough postmodern footnotes to make you feel all insiderly. It's sort of like being able to eat your cake and diet too.

Surely few productions have ever pulled an audience so immediately and unconditionally on their sides. The first few minutes of "The Drowsy Chaperone" take place in complete darkness, while an anxious but companionable voice drifts from the stage like a life line.

"I hate theater," the voice says. "Well, it's so disappointing, isn't it?" This voice, which belongs to a character called Man in Chair, offers up the prayer he says he always mutters before a show, requesting that it be short, free of actors who roam the audience and blessed with "a story and a few good songs that will take me away."

Imagine, he continues, a time when audiences eagerly awaited the latest from Cole Porter and the Gershwins. "Now," the Man says, "it's, 'Please, Elton John, must we continue this charade?' "Luckily for us, this Man — who is subsequently revealed sitting, alone, in a humble studio apartment — refuses to go away. He puts on a vinyl record of a 1928 musical called, yes, "The Drowsy Chaperone." And his drab little apartment becomes a show palace, with the original cast members summoned into being to recreate the production.

So we have been thoroughly primed to appreciate whatever follows, which turns out to be one of those intricately (and improbably) plotted tales of love in crisis — involving gangsters, show people, millionaires and servants — that showed up regularly in productions with titles like "Oh, Kay!" and "Sitting Pretty."

Musicals from the era of "The Drowsy Chaperone" had a renewed vogue in the mid-20th century, with works that ranged from pure parody (Sandy Wilson's "Boy Friend" in 1954, "Dames at Sea" in 1968) to retooled versions of the real thing ("No, No, Nanette" in 1971). The difference between these earlier productions and "The Drowsy Chaperone" is that the commentary — arch and adoring at the same time — was built into the style of the performances.

Directed and choreographed with untiring buoyancy by Casey Nicholaw, the cast members include Lenny Wolpe and Jennifer Smith as a sort of George Burns and Gracie Allen team; Troy Britton Johnson as the toothy and toothsome leading man; Danny Burstein as an overacting pseudo-Latin lover; and Beth Leavel as a strutting, martiniswigging vamp, enlisted as chaperone on the wedding day of one Janet Van De Graaff (Sutton Foster), darling of the Broadway stage, who is about to give it all up for love.

By the way, while "No, No, Nannette" had Ruby Keeler (the tapdancing ingénue of the film "42nd Street") on board as a performer to lend nostalgia-enhancing authenticity, "The Drowsy Chaperone" has Georgia Engel, who plays a ditsy, feathery-voiced rich woman. Ms. Engel and Edward Hibbert (who plays an inflexibly proper butler) perform spit take after spit take with gusto, as well as a sweet duet when they discover their love for each other. And the rest of the cast tap-dances up such a storm that you have no choice but to applaud. But the genuine wit lies almost entirely in Mr. Martin's asides.

The one performer who makes us forget about Mr. Martin is Ms. Foster, who has hitherto been known for her exhausting peppiness in shows like "Thoroughly Modern Millie" and "Little Women." As Janet the Broadway glamour-puss, a part that would seem made for excess, Ms. Foster instead pulls in the reins and gives a gloriously artificial, deadpan account of a woman who is almost as in love with love as she is with herself.

A little number called “Show Off” — in which Janet sings that she no longer needs attention while doing everything she can (including cartwheels) to hold the spotlight — is the one song that, on its own, lifts the audience into a helium paradise of pure pleasure.

Otherwise you have to squint compassionately to imagine that the characters onstage are as Mr. Martin would have us believe they are. Though I could have done without some shrill revelations about his character's mother fixation, Man in the Chair is a vital addition to the gallery of Broadway archetypes.

Judging by audience reaction to “The Drowsy Chaperone,” his hunger for a bona fide escapist musical would seem to be shared by many. If this production doesn't entirely fulfill that wish, it at least lets audiences express it in one fed-up communal voice.

DROWSY ANTECEDENTS…
1920’S JAZZ AGE MUSICALS WORTH REVISITING…

Barn Players “Drowsy Chaperone” Dramaturgy © 09/2011; Assembled by Ross Harmon.