Sandler and Young

Enter Dustin Czarny, Appleseed’s departing board chair. As he has
started two companies on his own, the improv group Don’t Feed the
Actors and a dinner theater outfit at the Locker Room on Hiawatha
Boulevard, Not Another Theater Company, he’s marking his departure from
Appleseed with a lengthy program note. To leave with a bang he’s
putting more than 40 people on the basement stage of the Atonement
Lutheran Church, 116 W. Glen Ave., eight of whom are in the band. As
some of the actors are taking multiple speaking roles, not credited in
the program, only he knows how many characters there are in the
much-anticipated production of The Wedding Singer.

If you think of The Wedding Singer as an Adam Sandler
vehicle, forget it. Sandler is an acquired taste that some of us never
got around to acquiring, but that’s nothing to hold against the show. A
great part of the movie’s appeal is hasty mock nostalgia for a bygone
era: the 1980s. Singer might have come out in 1998 but the
action is assertively set in 1985, flooded with chart hits: “Do You
Really Want to Hurt Me?” by Culture Club, “White Wedding” by Billy Idol
and Madonna’s “Holiday.” When The Wedding Singer became a
modest Broadway hit in 2006, the original songs were deleted and
replaced with new material by Matthew Sklar and Chad Beguelin in the
appropriate idiom.

When fashions go out of style, we have learned, they must suffer
through a period of being comic before they can become classics. So it
is with hand-held phones the size of bricks. Toward this end Czarny has
imported award-winning costumer Jeanette Reyner along with reliable
Harlow Kisselstein to get just the right (i.e. dated) look for the
stomping herd on stage. To keep reminding us of that decade, the script
calls for an appearance of Ronald Reagan, or at least a plausible
impersonator (Gerrit Vander Werff Jr.). The program neglects to tell
who’s doing what, but we also have celebrity cameos from the likes of
Cyndi Lauper, Imelda Marcos and Iggy Pop.

Robbie Hart (Terence LaCasse), the singer of the title, plies
downmarket motels of northern New Jersey, where you can see Newark on a
good day. He performs for bar mitzvahs and weddings with two pals, the
hairy Sammy (Jordan Westfall) and the somewhat effete George (John
Ginn). The musicians feel it’s agreeable work, with ready access to
free food and available ladies, but the job suffers a bit in status and
income. These are brought home when Robbie’s voluptuous bride-to-be,
Linda (JesseRose Pardee), dumps him at the altar because she doesn’t
think he’ll ever amount to anything. It’s crueler than in the movie
where she doesn’t show at the church and delivers the dirty news later.
Here she makes a kind of ghost appearance, as she sings out the news in
a letter to him, the show-stopping “A Note from Linda.”

Stumbling into Robbie’s life, literally, is Julia (Katie Lemos
Brown), a waitress from one of the reception halls where he performs.
She’s a doll, but it’s anything but love at first sight. Instead she’s
already engaged to a careerist yuppie, Glen Guglia (Jon Wilson), whose
full wallet wins the endorsement of Julia’s mother Angie (Kathleen
Egloff). Despite actor Wilson’s native charms, we’re turned off Glen
immediately because he’s a dunce of a businessman (loves New Coke but
says no one will ever pay $3 for a cup of coffee) and turns out to be
an even worse lover: He’s cheating on Julia even before the wedding.

Strangely for a musical comedy, much of both the first and second
acts are given over to Robbie’s wandering in the emotional deserts,
roaring in his complaint in some of the show’s best numbers, “Somebody
Kill Me” and “Casualty of Love.” He receives the consolation of Julia’s
lovely and exotic cousin Holly (Rachelle Clavin) and even more from
pint-sized comic grandmother, Rosie (Binaifer Dabu). Rosie had been a
singing student of Robbie’s in the movie but rises to more prominence
here as a salty-tongued, Estelle Getty-styled member of the family.
Both go on to huge, crowd-pleasing numbers, Clavin in “Saturday Night
in the City,” climaxed by dousing herself with water, and Dabu in the
rap-accented “Move That Thang,” a performance destined to live on in
community theater oral history.

Since we have observed the chemistry between Robbie and Julia from
the beginning, it takes extensive contrivance from Chad Beguelin and
Tim Herlihy’s book to keep the lovers apart until the final curtain.
For a while Robbie considers going yuppie, as when he and Glen warble
“All About the Green.” In a moment of bogus tension, Robbie mistakes
Julia’s intentions when he spies through her window to see her in a
wedding dress. But, hey, can Julia ever expect to marry a guy whose
last name is Guglia?

A show this big can hardly be expected to be perfect, and a list of
small defects, like players not standing over their marks or dancers
not kicking on cue could weigh you down. The reasons The Wedding Singer is
an unprecedented box-office smash for Appleseed (attendants are even
directing traffic in the parking lot!) include compelling energy and
exuberance, exemplified in Stephfond Brunson and Rachelle Clavin’s
choreography, in which they both appear while also serving as dance
captains.

Terence (formerly Terry) LaCasse makes Robbie his coming-of-age
role. His face has been familiar for at least 10 years, but he’s been
reinventing himself at Le Moyne College, taking challenging roles in
Shakespeare and Brian Friel and directing the likes of Jean-Paul
Sartre. Along with his reliable power to make audiences like him,
LaCasse creates a character from his native persona, not just a cute
song-and-dance-man, but an anguished Gentile schlemiel, who struggles with himself as well as his fate.

Katie Lemos Brown, a well-trained performer with national credits,
knows how to have Julia send us (and Robbie) two messages at once. How
ironic that a woman with such graceful deportment should make her
entrance by stumbling, but that’s what acting is.

The Wedding Singer arrives with unprecedented pent-up
audience demand. This enthusiastic Appleseed mounting sends the crowd
home happy.                                         

This production runs through July 3. See Times Table for information.