The Drowsy Chaperone: PoMo Musical

"The Drowsy Chaperone," a relatively new Broadway musical is stupid and boring. What makes it utterly abominable is that it is a postmodern musical. It has that knowing, ironic quality about it which I hated.

The play begins as follows: the theater is dark. The omniscent narrator of the play says a small prayer along the lines of, "You're going to a Broadway play. You utter a small prayer. Please god, don't let it be boring. Please god, let it be short." Get it? Here we are at a Broadway play in which the narrator is also talking about seeing a Broadway play.

When the lights come on, we see the sitting room of a small apartment. The narrator is a character of the play. The narrator is meant to be a square boring type. He wears a cardigan and some ill-fitting pants. He looks about 50. He loves Broadway plays. He decides to play the soundtrack of one of his favorite plays from the 1920s, "The Drowsy Chaperone."

As the soundtrack plays, the actual Broadway play takes place in the narrator's living room. The narrator, seated in his armchair in the corner, provides commentary throughout.

The play: Janet Van Der Graaf (sp?) is a movie star and is about to marry a certain person. Her chaperone is the drowsy chaperone, though a more accurate description would be boozy chaperone. She's drawsy because she's drunk.

Wedding preparations: The fiance is also an actor, in toothpaste commercials? He smiles a lot and is generally a foppish ridiculous character. His friend decides to take over the wedding preparations and asks him to leave the premises. In a setpiece which is supposed to be comic but is just stupid in the extreme, the friend puts the fiance on roller skates and blindfolds him. I'm still not sure why. The fiance then sings the song, "I'm an accident waiting to happen."

Janet then decides to test her fiance's love for her by pretending to be someone else and then aggressively coming on to him. The fiance who is blindfolded kisses her. She then leaves and confronts him later and breaks up with him on account of his infidelity.

There is a Latin lover character, a Latin guy with a terrible accent and preposterous romantic pretentions (that is, he thinks he is romantic but is actually absurd). This lover decides to break up the wedding by seducing the bride. He mistakes the chaperone for the bride and ends up seducing the woman who is only too willing.

A series of incredible low points follow. The lowest point is where Janet sings a song to her fiance about her disappointment. The narrator says, though the lyrics are just absurd, the melody is beautiful. The melody, like all the melodies in the play is one of these generic, basically pleasing, 20-ish melodies. But the lyrics: "I put a monkey on a pedestal." To have to listen to such rot!

Janet and the fiance make up. It is at this point I think that we get a long commentary which is purportedly comic but actually tedious from the narrator about how things always work out on Broadway but never in real life. We also learn that he is divorced.

Janet and the fiance marry. The drowsy chaperone and the Latin Lover also marry.

Another pomo moment, Janet asks the chaperone for advice. "L---- while you can", she says. Does she say "leave" or "live?" We don't know because the Latin lover drops his walking stick when she says leave/live. So the narrator "replays" that scene a few times. So we see that line done a few times by the performers.

Then we have the final extravaganza number. I think an "aviatrix" or female pilot shows up. I don't remember why she's there. I think that may have been the point. To have someone there for no reason at all.

I think during the final extravaganza, there's a power outage. So the extravaganza stops. The play has occassionly interrupted by the narrator's phone ringing, so he has unplugged it. Turns out it was the building electrician who had been calling. He comes to the apartment to fix something. He goes through the apartment, which is also the place where the Broadway performers, comeplete with aviatrix's airplane, are standing. He finishes his job and leaves. Again, this scene is meant to be hilarious, but it is just extremely tedious.

The narrator is in anguish. He talks about how awful it is that the moment was ruined. Should he replay the entire record again? Instead he decides to just start where we had left off (thank god!).

Another important pomo moment happens during the intermission. I think a scene change is going on behind the curtain. The narrator eats a power bar because he has a low blood sugar issue ("issue" pronounced with a very sibilant ess sound).

When he puts the second record for the second half of the play onto the phonograph, we get another play, set in China. The narrator has put on the wrong record. The Chinese emperor is played by the Latin lover with the exact same preposterous accent. An English visitor to his court is played by the woman who plays the drowsy chaperone. Why do the Caucasians find the Asians so interesting? the English visitor sings.

The narrator then puts the correct record on.

The play is meant to be funny, but it isn't. The jokes are cringe inducingly bad. The play within a play and the commentary are meant to be clever but aren't.

It is very difficult to come up with a winning musical. Creating a musical out of sneering at a musical doesn't make a good musical. For instance, having to listen to the song "Monkey on a pedastal" was absolute torture. And anyway, I don't think a 1920s musical would have been as stupid as all this.

The narrator says repeatedly that he loves musicals because he finds them transporting. That life is difficult and dull and depressing, but the musical isn't. I agree that the old Broadway musicals are happy, fun, and exciting.
But the problem is his frequent interruptions and commentary on the goings-on and the whole ironic winking pomo quality ruin any chance that the musical has of being transporting (not that the play which unfolds in his living room had much chance of doing that).

Don't see it.