Not Great

Foothills transforms Vaudeville into boreville

by Steve Vineberg

THE GREAT AMERICAN BACKPORCH VAUDEVILLE REVUE Conceived, written, and directed by Marc P. Smith. Original songs and musical direction by Stephen Murray. Choreographed by Denise Day. Set designed by Michael Reidy. Costumes by Ted Giammona. Lighting by Annmarie Duggan. With Jerry Bisantz, Celeste McClain, Stephen Murray, Terrence O'Malley, Liana Reda, Dorian Gray Ross, Cory Scott, Doug Shapiro, and Monica Tosches. At Foothills Theatre, through January 3.

Easily a dozen and a half songs from the first decades of the century are heard in act one of Foothills Theatre's The Great American Backporch Vaudeville Revue, and not a single one is performed memorably. And that's not the fault of the six men and three women in the cast, who seem to be a talented bunch. The show purports to be a tribute to vaudeville, but the numbers are tied to a script by Marc P. Smith (who also directed) that suffocates both the songs and the actors. The director's note in the press material explains his aim: "to maintain the essence, the fun -- and the relevance of vaudeville at this end of the 20th century"; he claims, "Vaudeville did its work in pulling a nation together a century ago and it continues to do so." I have no idea what he's talking about; as a popular art form, vaudeville began to fade with the development of the book musical in the '20s and its last gasps were drowned out by the sound of Al Jolson singing "My Mammy" in The Jazz Singer in moviehouses across the country. But whatever Smith means, the claptrap masquerading as vaudeville on the Foothills stage has little resemblance to the real thing. It's a forced narrative about a group of people workshopping a revue on the porch of a house. When they're interrupted by a neighbor who objects to their noise (implausibly, at midday), they make him sit and watch, and before long he finds himself co-opted into the project.

What is this supposed to be -- musical theatre of the absurd? Hooked up to a script that doesn't make sense on any dramatic level, the nine ebullient performers (including the show's musical director, Stephen Murray, who doubles on piano) bounce around the stage, dutifully conveying Denise Day's over-exuberant choreography, looking about as comfortable as live figures on a puppet stage. The dialogue has Smith's trademark combination -- a lack of dramatic logic combined with a compulsion for overexplicitness; he's like an endlessly self-amused bore you get stuck next to on a long train ride who insists on telling you terrible jokes and then explaining what makes them so funny. Unfortunately, the cast has to read these lines, and Smith has directed them to do so with that awful show-biz fakery that can make even likable actors look like narcissists. I haven't felt so embarrassed for performers on a stage since Smith's last musical-theater piece, Backstage Confidential. There's a particularly agonizing twenty-minute section near the end of the first act where several weepers are sung back to back in an ironic, exaggerated style that's meant to tell us how ridiculous these ballads are. Verse after verse makes exactly the same thing: aren't we superior to this quaint, old-fashioned melodrama? The smugness is Smith's, of course, but it's the singers who end up looking obnoxious. And since they aren't permitted to vary their camp approach, the monotony is enough to drive you mad.

The second act is more of a straightforward revue, and bits and pieces are pleasant enough. Monica Tosches performs "Sam, You Made the Pants Too Long" in clownishly outsized trousers. Terrence O'Malley applies his light, high, uncertain voice to "And the Band Played On," and he's so unaffected -- and the song, after all these decades, is still such a beauty -- that he's quite touching. Dorian Gray Ross pays tribute to the great black comic Bert Williams, a Ziegfeld discovery, by resurrecting his signature song, "Nobody," which would probably be a knockout with some directorial shaping. (Ross is good, but he lingers too long on every effect.) Liana Reda performs "Second Hand Rose," one of the novelties made famous by the enchanting Ziegfeld star Fanny Brice. Less successfully, Jerry Bisantz and Doug Shapiro cover "Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean," the musical routine attached to a celebrated pair of Irish dialect comics; I'd say the names were a dead giveaway, yet for reasons I can't fathom, Bisantz and Shapiro do the song with Bronx Jewish accents.

But the second-act diversions are too few, and they come far too late to justify The Great American Backporch Vaudeville Revue. Let's be frank: Smith is the artistic director of Foothills, so he can use the space to house his own private creations -- to turn the theater into his own back porch. But he's a playwright only by self-declaration, and it's the worst kind of theatrical vanity to produce your own doodlings on a stage with professional actors just because there's no one around to say you can't. Foothills prides itself in bringing its shows in at two hours, but this one dawdles in at two hours thirty-five minutes, so clearly even the rules of Smith's own house don't apply to him. (Do we really need to hear all four verses of "Come Home, Come Home"?) At one point in act one we're told that the origin of the word "vaudeville" is a French phrase, "voix de ville," which means "voice of the people." But that's not the voice of the people you hear in The Great American Backporch Vaudeville Revue -- it's the sound of one man clapping himself on the back.