Last night we saw "The Drowsy Chaperone"

[rhu]

Last night we saw The Drowsy Chaperone.
Our friends mabfan and gnomi came with us.
We had a blast. "I love this show so much!"

The curtain came up on the apartment, and it felt like coming home. It was just as I remembered it from the Broadway production, as I've been seeing it in my mind's eye every time I listen to the recording.

The cast was quite good. Not as excellent as the original Broadway cast (no one will ever touch Sutton Foster's Jane Roberts's Janet Van De Graaff's (I Don't Wanna) Show Off), of course, but not too much below them, either.

Aldopho didn't have the low notes for his song, but compensated with some clever shtick. In general, though, he didn't quite have the stage presence that Danny Burstein had to pull off the overacting. Drowsy was also not quite as much a force of nature as Beth Leavel had made her. But they were at one another's level, so it worked out pretty well.

The Tall Brothers, actually, were perhaps a shade better in this production. I thought their comic timing was a smidge tighter than what I remembered from Broadway.

It didn't take long for me to get used to Man in Chair not being Bob Martin, which is good. I'd have gone crazy all night otherwise --- it's fine to sit there comparing Underlings, but you have to be able to project yourself onto Man in Chair and you can't do that if you're aware that he's being played by an actor.

The compensation for the lack of a trap worked out ok. "Disappear through the floor no more" was replaced by "Hear the audience roar no more." Fine.

Two musical complaints:

Things were way overamplified, which made some of the vocalists hard to hear (especially Trix) and even a bit distorted. That got better as the evening wore on, so I'll hope that it was merely that they were getting used to the new venue. (Last night was the official opening night of the Boston run.)

Tempi were often way too fast. Jokes went by so fast that they were sometimes hard to hear and the next line stepped on the laughter. "Try not to think about the poodles," which I think is introverte's favorite line in the whole show, was completely missed by most of the audience. This isn't a long show to begin with; there was no need to rush things so much.

If you're in Boston and haven't yet bought tickets, I will urge you to run, not walk, to your computer (Oh, you're already there? That was fast!) and order your seats now. This is the best musical about a drowsy chaperone you're likely to see this season. I would go every night of the run if I could.

And, according to the Playbill bio, Bob Martin is still happily married to Janet van de Graaff in real life.

One final thing that I have to include,
For qaqaq: Monkey! Monkey! Monkey! (Done)

---

Today the Omer's number reaches four

Comments

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

Thank you again for inviting us to join you. And thank you for the kind words about my brother Danny. :-)

[qaqaq.livejournal.com]

When I saw it down here, it was also pretty close in quality to the Broadway run that I saw (which still had most of the original cast at that point, aside from Bob Martin and Edward Hibert).

One reason the "monkey! monkey!" scene stands out for me is because that's one of the moments that surprised me most. When listening to the recording at that point, the listener hears a repeated musical sound (I don't want to spoil it), and I hadn't previously realized that it was being produced the way it was; when I saw it onstage in that over-the-top manner, I found it unexpected and very funny.