Dead or alive

The laughs don't last in Lucky Stiff

by Steve Vineberg

LUCKY STIFF Book and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens. Music by Stephen Flaherty. Based on The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo by Michael Butterworth. Directed and choreographed by Dennis Courtney. Musical direction by Jim Rice. Set designed by Laurel Dahill. Costumes by Ted Giammona. Lighting by Sarah Sullivan. With Mark S. Cartier, Celeste McClain, Natalie Brown, Doug Shapiro, Dared Wright, Michael Poisson, Bruce Ward, Cory Scott, Monica Tosches, and Deborah Stein. At Worcester Foothills Theatre, through January 4.

When I was in college in the late '60s and early '70s, many shows still trouped through Boston on their way to Broadway, stopping over for a few weeks at the Colonial or the Shubert to try to iron out the kinks. And a lot of them were musicals with kinks that no amount of touring could smooth away. I'm thinking of unforgettable fiascos like Lolita My Love and Georgy, Prettybelle, and Ray Bolger's swan song Come Summer -- musicals I cherish the programs from, because without them I'd have no proof that these shows actually existed and weren't just the nightmares of an undergraduate theater student.

Those days came flooding back to me while I was watching Lucky Stiff, the musical comedy currently on display at Foothills. Lucky Stiff is the wretched child of composer Stephen Flaherty and librettist Lynn Ahrens, who collaborated on Once on This Island and the new Ragtime. It's a relentlessly upbeat musical farce (based on Michael Butterworth's The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo) premised on the idea, evidently hilarious to someone somewhere along the way, that an unhappy English shoe salesman stands to inherit six million from his New Jersey uncle, but only if he escorts the old guy's corpse around Monte Carlo, treating him as if he were still alive. If you aren't already rolling on the floor, maybe these accessory plot details will send you into gales of laughter. (1) If Harry the salesman fails to carry out the smallest codicil of Uncle Tony's will, the money will go to a home for abandoned dogs in Brooklyn, which has sent a representative to shadow him. (2) Uncle Tony's myopic mistress and her optometrist brother show up, too, also chasing the six million, which she and Tony swindled out of her gangster husband.

And just in case this hyperactive plot isn't enough to lay you out, there's a song about every five minutes. The characters sing about steaming open a telegram; they sing about homeless dogs (there's actually a duet titled "Dogs Versus You"). Flaherty's dim music is set to lyrics by Ahrens that begin with lines like "There's a woman in my bathroom in a sheet" and go downhill from there. You may feel you're listening to a parody of bad musical theater, only nothing about it is remotely funny. And then, in the middle of act two, the hero has a nightmare in which all the other characters dance and sing with dog masks on their faces, waving outsize cardboard cut-out props -- and you discover with a shock that nothing you've seen or heard, horrible as it is, could have prepared you for this moment.

The Foothills production is visually ugly; at one point Harry mentions the stars and you realize that the little white dots projected on the cyclorama aren't actually meant to look like bleach stains. Meanwhile, however, the 10 actors (some of them cast in as many as half a dozen roles) work as hard as humanly possible. Most of them sing well, and they perform the singularly witless score as if it were Lerner and Loewe or Sondheim. Mark S. Cartier, who plays Harry, can't get his mouth around the requisite English accent and seems generally miscast, and Natalie Brown, as the short-sighted gun-toting Rita, overplays maniacally, but the rest of the company earned my compassion. The most skillful singer is Doug Shapiro (as Vinnie the optometrist), and in the first act he manages to make the most of his comic-book looks -- he has one of those superhero granite jaws atop a gangly frame. (The second act uses him up.) The most skillful farceur is Monica Tosches, who plays all the landladies, secretaries, and maids in the script. Two of her sketches are memorable: the weepy secretary who brings Harry together with Uncle Tony's corpse (played, with deadpan humor, by Dared Wright) and an inebriated maid at the hotel in Monte Carlo. These performers deserve special credit for making an impression as they cavort amidst the rubble of Lucky Stiff. And the whole cast deserves the Croix de Guerre just for getting through it every night.