School days

Making music with The Boy Friend

by Steve Vineberg

THE BOY FRIEND. Book, music, and lyrics by Sandy Wilson. Directed by Gail Steele. Musical direction by Jeff Williams. Choreographed by Dede Recko. Set designed by Jim McDonough. Costumes by Paula Ouelette. Lighting by Paul Martini. With Laurie Marcinkewicz, Tim Smith, Sarah Huddleston, Shane Desmond, Hillary Steele, Jonathan Earls, Ryann Bingham, John Sullivan, Heidi Mondeau, and Pattie Coleman. At Theatre at the Mount, Gardner, May 9 and 10.

Sandy Wilson's charmingly inconsequential 1954 musical The Boy Friend is chiefly remembered as the show that initiated Julie Andrews's career (she leaped from it straight into My Fair Lady). And those with especially sadistic memories will recall it as the source of Ken Russell's horrific, pathologically overblown 1971 movie. What audiences in the 1950s were still close enough to recognize but we are not is the target of Wilson's good-natured parody, the musical comedies of the '20s. Before Show Boat invented the dramatic musical in 1927, book musicals (as opposed to revues) were romantic farces with songs and dances strung like beads on a thin string of plot. The purpose of the storyline was merely to keep the ingenue and the juvenile out of each other's arms, through a series of stock devices (like mistaken identity), until moments before the final curtain.

Musicals like these -- the most famous were the "Princess Theatre shows" assembled by Jerome Kern, P.G. Wodehouse, and Guy Bolton beginning in 1915 -- were really too disposable to be taken seriously; The Boy Friend doesn't have anything like the charge of, say, John Gay's spoof of ballad-operas, The Beggar's Opera (which is also a political satire). But it's fun, even now when the musicals Wilson kids so affectionately are rarely if ever revived. Wilson's score includes a full spectrum of numbers -- ensembles, romantic duets, novelties, a Charleston, a tango, even an invented dance called "The Riviera." Few of them are memorable, but they wash over you pleasantly enough. And in the production at Theatre at the Mount, they're well sung, especially by Laurie Marcinkewicz as the heroine, Polly, a poor little rich girl in love with Tony, a millionaire's son impersonating a messenger boy (played by Tim Smith, who makes a fine vocal match for her), and by Sarah Huddleston as Mme. Dubonnet, the headmistress of the finishing school Polly attends in Nice. The show's musical highlight comes late in the third act, when the two women harmonize on the loveliest song in the score, "Poor Little Pierrette."

The Mount's show has a modest charm, especially in the visuals -- Jim McDonough's set and the vivid Roaring '20s clothes from Paula Ouelette's Fantasy World Costumes. (It's odd, though, that at the third-act masquerade ball none of the characters is wearing a costume, and conspicuous that Polly and Tony don't show up as Pierrette and Pierrot, despite multiple references to their disguises in the script.) I particularly enjoyed the Charleston number executed by Hillary Steele and a grinning stringbean named Jonathan Earls, and the interplay, musical, and otherwise, of Steele and the other "perfect young ladies" at Mme. Dubonnet's school -- Jessie Vescovi, Lydia Jenkins Musco, Heidi Mondeau, and Lauren Munroe.

The Boy Friend is a typical Mount show: strong on singing and dancing (Jeff Williams and Dede Recko handled the musical direction and the choreography, respectively), weak on acting. I thought the deficiencies of the acting would matter less in a show as light in the book department as this one, but the feel of The Boy Friend needs to be airy, and the director, Gail Steele, lets the performers mug too much, which weighs it down. Of the hard-working, eager cast, only Tim Smith really has the finesse to carry off the style in the non-musical sections. And though this may sound like nitpicking, I wish Steele had thought to invite a French teacher from Mount Wachusett College, where the company resides, to spend an hour or two with the cast and correct their pronunciation of the French words. She has enough sense of the style Wilson's going for to stage tableaux for the ends of acts and an elaborate period curtain call, and she and McDonough bring in a garlanded swing for the "Poor Little Pierrette" number and an immense flowery valentine to frame the lovers in the finale. The performances could use the same kind of loving detail.