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Imagine, he continues, a time when audiences eagerly awaited the latest from Cole Porter and the Gershwins.

#Aldolpho drowsy chaperone broadway free#

Martin), offers up the prayer he says he always mutters before a show, requesting that it be short, free of actors who roam the audience and blessed with 'a story and a few good songs that will take me away.' 'Well, it's so disappointing, isn't it?' This voice, which belongs to a character called Man in Chair (rendered with clinical exactitude by Mr.

#Aldolpho drowsy chaperone broadway professional#

The first few minutes of 'The Drowsy Chaperone,' which began professional life at the Toronto Fringe Festival in 1999, take place in complete darkness, while an anxious but companionable voice drifts from the stage like a life line. Surely few productions have ever pulled an audience so immediately and unconditionally on their sides. It's sort of like being able to eat your cake and diet too. Martin and Don McKellar, arrives at a moment when Broadway audiences have been battered, bruised and bludgeoned to sleep by blunt instruments of shows like 'Ring of Fire' and 'Lestat.'Īnd now here is a musical that frankly sets itself up as a short (1 hour 40 minutes), happy exercise in escapism, adorned with just enough postmodern footnotes to make you feel all insiderly. 'The Drowsy Chaperone,' which has songs by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison and a book by Mr. Without its ingenious narrative framework and two entrancing performances - by Bob Martin as a lonely, musical-loving schlemiel with a hyperactive fantasy life and Sutton Foster as the showgirl heroine of his dreams - 'The Drowsy Chaperone' would feel at best like a festive entree at a high-end suburban dinner theater.īut try telling that to the theatergoers who are responding to this hard-working production as if they were withering house plants that, after weeks of neglect, have finally tasted water again. Though this revved-up spoof of a 1920's song-and-dance frolic, as imagined by an obsessive 21st-century show queen, seems poised to become the sleeper of the Broadway season, it is not any kind of a masterpiece. The gods of timing, who are just as crucial to success in show business as mere talent is, have smiled brightly upon 'The Drowsy Chaperone,' the small and ingratiating musical that opened last night at the big and intimidating Marquis Theater.