Other stock characters abound as well, including a licentious Broadway producer and his untalented but otherwise appealing chorine girlfriend a haughty matron and her very proper butler and a narcissistic Latin lover. Kanaski and Jonathen Blue, who plays George, the anxious best man, show fancy feet and flair with an entertaining tap dance number. Beem belts out in Ethel Merman fashion, and Smith shows tremendous soprano range, hitting the high notes. Songs with ridiculous lyrics and dance numbers appear for no real narrative reason, but they do entertain and showcase talent. Meanwhile, unlikely couples instantly fall in love, so that there may be more than one replacement wedding that day.Īs is probably already apparent, this send-up is rife with tropes from musicals. It seems that their boss is an investor in a show that stars Janet, and it would probably flop without her.
While this causes some consternation, that’s fine with two gangsters acting as chefs, as they are charged with finding a way to stop the wedding.
While Robert doesn’t see Janet, he does kiss her, not knowing it’s her, and that becomes the basis for the bride wanting to call off the wedding. Janet’s drunken chaperone, played with great panache by the redoubtable Daniela Innocenti Beem, is charged with ensuring that the groom doesn’t see the bride before the ceremony. Several hilariously delivered plot turns drive the action. The reality of the show’s evolution is that “The Drowsy Chaperone” began as a spoof of old musicals that was performed at a stag party for a real engaged couple with the same names as the characters in the show. The opening premise of the fiction is that Janet van de Graaf and Robert Martin, played by the charming and talented pair of Maeve Smith and Stephen Kanaski, are to be married on the day that the musical takes place. Sonoma Arts Live takes on this frothy concoction and delivers a production that bubbles with delight from curtain’s (figurative) rise to fall. To his amazement, not only does the music and dialogue from a musical that he’s heard but never seen come through the hi-fi, but the musical’s action takes place right there behind him in his drab apartment! This is the conceit of “The Drowsy Chaperone,” a fictitious musical from 1928. The “Man in Chair” is a Broadway musical devotee who places the soundtrack album of his favorite musical on the turntable. In the lonely solitude of one’s own living room, the imagination can take flights of fancy.
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