Vanilla Nice

Just as the movie American Graffiti, set on a summer night in 1963, inferred that John Kennedy’s assassination metaphorically ended America’s innocence, Forever Plaid
pivots on the seismic musical milestone that occurred on Feb. 9, 1964:
The Beatles spearheading “the British Invasion” with their appearance
on The Ed Sullivan Show. As The Plaids, a fictionalized,
not-so-fab foursome modeled after clean-cut lads such as The Four
Freshmen, headed to their first big gig at a sleepy airport lounge, the
guys’ vehicle was sideswiped by a busload of Catholic schoolgirls on
their way to see Sullivan’s “really big shew.” The girls survived, but
The Plaids ended up in some heavenly limbo, and now they’ve returned to
earth to perform the set that they couldn’t do 45 years earlier.

Muzak makers: From left, Christopher Lukos, Dean Maroulakos, Andrew Moss and Christopher Timson in Cortland Repertory’s Forever Plaid.

 

Hmmmm, sounds like an excuse to warble
more than two dozen tracks from the I Like Ike era. Indeed, these days
the songs that form Forever Plaid’s narrative spine, such as
“Moments to Remember,” “Shangri-La” and the Perry Como hit “Catch a
Falling Star,” never even make the playlists on so-called oldies radio
stations, instead being reclassified as “easy listening” by radio
formatters and now turning up mostly on AM stations that have yet to be
commandeered by right-wing blowhards. And Forever Plaid
initially seems targeted to the Jurassic demographic; after all, the
audience that still remembers hearing these ditties during their
original chart days is surely dwindling.

Yet the underlying theme of this show
is that these clueless Plaids, blessed with all-American names
including Smudge, Jinx, Frankie and Sparky, were already dead,
career-wise, in 1964—but that still doesn’t stop them from having a
good time. And that’s what is accentuated by director-choreographer
Bert Bernardi’s bouncy approach to this gentle parody. 

Bernardi instructs his
players—Christopher Timson as Jinx, Andrew Kenneth Moss as Sparky,
Christopher Lukos as Smudge and Dean Maroulakos playing Frankie—to
engage in plenty of gee-whiz idealism to accompany their smooth
four-part harmonies. These endearing dorks ably handle the exacting
moves mandated by the deliberately klutzy choreographed numbers,
notably a cornball routine involving toilet plungers as props. 

And the performers’ tongues are only
slightly in their cheeks during The Plaids’ vanilla rendition of The
Beatles’ “She Loves You”—only instead of the requisite “yeah yeah yeah”
lyrics, they substitute a cheerful “Yessiree!” This musical moment has
its many antecedents, from Pat Boone’s mainstream version of “Tutti
Frutti” to Frank Sinatra’s misguided cover of Jim Croce’s “Bad Bad
Leroy Brown.”

The actors make for a tight ensemble,
with teensy smidgens of character development that highlight each one,
like Timson’s Jinx suffering from a nosebleed, which leads another
Plaid to remark, “I didn’t think you could still bleed!” If only
because of his lanky physique and bespectacled appearance, Lukos as
Smudge occasionally separates himself from the pack, with moments of
self-doubt (“I was never good at patter,” he laments when pressed into
service during the nosebleed incident) and his mock-solemn medley of
“Sixteen Tons” and “Chain Gang” while whacking a Heinz ketchup bottle
with a spoon to provide a crucial sound effect. 

Yet Timson as Jinx effectively hams it
up with Johnnie Ray’s torch song “Cry,” while Maroulakos’ Frankie is
prominent in “Crazy ’Bout Ya Baby” and his participation in “Chain
Gang,” and Moss’ Sparky highlights the loopy “Perfidia.” Music director
and keyboardist David Hahn, accompanied by Shannon Cockbill on bass,
skillfully assists the acting quartet as they move from one forgotten
chart-topper to the next.

Aside from spoofing a long-ago pop music style, Forever Plaid
mines both comedy from the group’s un-ironic earnestness, especially
when they take in stride a newspaper clipping that dimly reviews their
show (“The Plaids’ sound is to contemporary music as Formica is to
marble.”), as well as poignancy, as the boys display album covers for
themed LPs (everything from Christmas to spaghetti westerns) that will
never be committed to vinyl. There’s a few naughty bits, too, such as
The Plaids’ business card that asserts, “We’d love to work your private
functions.” Such risque material has been trimmed in some local
productions, but Cortland Repertory’s producing artistic director Kerby
Thompson (who introduced a recent matinee addressed entirely in plaid,
right down to his footwear) apparently decided that his audiences could
handle such “blue humor.” 

Forever Plaid’s comic highlight is its three-minute, 11-second distillation of a typical episode of The Ed Sullivan Show,
a pop-culture potpourri of highbrow-meets-lowbrow with cameos from
jugglers, plate spinners, Topo Gigio and Senor Wences. When there’s a
reference to former funnyman Bill “Jose Jiminez” Dana, one has to
wonder: Fifty years from now, will people still be laughing over the
antics of schlumpy slacker Seth Rogen?o

This production runs through Sept. 4. See Times Table for information.