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Famed Broadway shows get their uproarious comeuppance in Rarely Done Productions’ second helping of The Musical of Musicals: The Musical. This nifty knockoff addresses what makes the composers’ epic-scale works so endearing while also playfully deconstructing them via an anything-goes reservoir of puns, caricatures and song parodies.
It’s not as easy as it sounds, however. And we’re not talking novelty versions of the tunesmiths’ classic catalogs, either, such as the type of humorous homages found in yesteryear’s TV variety shows hosted by the likes of Sid Caesar, Bob Hope and Carol Burnett. In fact, Musical geniuses Eric Rockwell and Joanne Bogart present a diverting, even daunting, five-course menu crammed with semi-original numbers that slyly poke fun at the composers’ respective resumes, right down to lifting lyrical cues that everybody knows and comically rearranging them.
Context is important, too. Musical starts with jaunty jabs at Rodgers and Hammerstein and later riffs on the Andrew Lloyd Webber repertoire, with both segments zeroing in on the sense of majestic emptiness that sometimes can be mined from their respective shows. Rarely Done did the first incarnation of Musical in September 2007, with most of that production’s key personnel, including director Dan Tursi, back for deserved encores. It’s smooth sailing all the way for the current version at Jazz Central, 441 E. Washington St., which kicks off the company’s season of greatest-hits revivals.
The opening salvo of “Corn!,” which merrily mangles R&H’s 1943 Oklahoma!, sets the template for the four subsequent hit-and-run vignettes, as peopled by a quartet of same-named characters with nearly identical plot motivations. The scenario recalls the hoary “you must pay the rent/but I can’t pay the rent” type of melodrama, which is surely older than vaudeville itself. Cash-strapped June (Aubry Panek) fends off the advances of landlord Jitter (Peter Irwin), with strapping hayseed Big Willy (Jimmy Curtin) to her rescue, and Mother Abby (Jodie Baum) dispensing folksy wisdom from the sidelines.
The satire is barnyard broad at all times, and anyone can burst into song at the drop of a corn husk. At one point, Big Willy warbles, “Farmin’ the land is the life for me/ It calls me and I cain’t say no!/ But I’d gladly forsake any shovel or rake/ I’m in love with a wonderful hoe!” Those with a Great White Way woody have a head start in appreciating the R&H references, but even theater novices will laugh at the goofy, spoofy, borderline-naughty wordplay.
The punny rejoinders likewise aspire to the inventive silliness of the movie Airplane!, while referring, of course, to yet another R&H classic:
Big Willy: “That lease’ll never hold up in court!”
Jitter: “Yes, it will. And don’t call me Liesl!”
Following “Corn!” is the Stephen Sondheim-ian backhanded salute “A Little Complex,” with funny nods to Sweeney Todd among others, as brooding Manhattan tenants collide in their gloomy apartment building known as The Woods. Jitter’s the landlord again, natch, but he’s also a screws-loose painter suffering from the tortured-artist effect, and he has dire plans for ditzy June, who thinks that birds have nested on her head.
Aside from the Sondheim jokes, this segment also lends itself to movie allusions, such as Woody Allen’s serious but dour dramas (think Interiors, his angst-ridden take on Ingmar Bergman), while Jitter’s murderous scheme for the soon-to-be-evicted June recalls the plot from Roger Corman’s drive-in classic A Bucket of Blood (1959), which actually seems tailor-made for a Broadway tuner adaptation. After all, look what happened when Little Shop of Horrors made the flicks-to-floorboards transition. (Incidentally, Musical authors Rockwell and Bogart have also penned Golly Gee Whiz, which kids those golden-age MGM showcases for Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland.)
The first two mini-musicals are slightly more guy-centric, too. For “Corn!,” Jimmy Curtin, the only acting newbie who wasn’t in the 2007 production, lends an appropriate Dennis Quaid-esque bigness to his Big Willy rube, while Peter Irwin manages to keep a straight face while delivering Jitter’s tongue-in-cheek dialogue with a Southern-fried accent (he has a habit of referring to Willy as “Mr. High-and-Mighty”). Irwin also smoothly ratchets up the comically psychotic neuroses for his Jitter in “A Little Complex,” so don’t expect any mustache-twirling, a la Snidely Whiplash. Even music director Michael Copps gets into the acts with occasional narrative duties, especially in “Corn!” when he introduces a dream dance that is more like “a highly symbolic ballet, sort of run of {choreographer Agnes} DeMille.”
The ladies take over the next two segments. “Dear Abby,” which offers spot-on parodies of Jerry Herman’s Hello, Dolly! and Mame, puts Jodie Baum front and center as the quintessential brassy broad who drops peerless one-liners: “Life is a star vehicle, and most poor suckers are in a bus and truck!” Always adorned with a multicolored feathered boa around her neck, the running gag here concerns Baum’s Abby as she makes a series of florid entrances on and off the stage (atop a push cart, no less), with audience applause encouraged. Baum’s no slouch at belting ’em out into the cheap seats; her bravura handling of the clever show-biz lament, “Did I Put Out Enough?,” is a real showstopper.
Then it’s Aubry Panek’s turn at the spotlight for “Aspects of Junita,” which makes sport of Evita and also lobs visual bits at other Andrew Lloyd Webber works, with a chandelier and a dreamcoat among the expected chuckles. Panek also makes a grand entrance in a sight gag that won’t be revealed here, as “Junita” milks for all it’s worth the familiar “superstar” theme that drives several of the composer’s musicals.
The ensemble caps this breezy 90 minutes or so with “Speakeasy,” a run-amuck condensation of elements from John Kander and Fred Ebb’s Cabaret, plus bonus bons mots cribbed from Chicago. Irwin’s Jitter takes on the Emcee chores here, with the Kit Kat Club girls featuring Baum, Panek and a bewigged Curtin, a cross-dressing gimmick that is actually featured in some Cabaret productions.
Baum is again the recipient of a scene-stealing routine, with her amoral Abby singing “Easy Mark,” done in the style of Marlene Dietrich, and which surely led to her award-winning triumph from the Syracuse New Times Syracuse Area Live Theater (SALT) Academy during Musical of Musical’s 2007 run. Pavement princess Abby, it seems, sold herself during an evening for $50.10, an odd price that leads to an ancient punchline that cavemen were probably telling around the campfire during the Jurassic era—yet Baum’s deadpan comic timing makes the gag seem brand new. That’s how you win SALT trophies around here.
This production runs through Saturday, Nov. 3. See Times Table for information.
