Theatre in Review: Dames at Sea (Helen Hayes Theatre)

	John Bolton, Eloise Kropp. Photo: Jeremy Daniel

How times have changed: Wasn't it only a little while ago that Broadway musicals were being dismissed as hopelessly retro? (The currently running Something Rotten! continues to spread this canard, presenting musical theatre as a display of glitzy costumes, jazz hands, and kick lines.) Now, to a Broadway landscape dominated by such forward-looking fare as Hamilton, Fun Home, and Spring Awakening, comes Dames at Sea, arriving like a long-lost signal from the old RKO Radio Pictures tower. Whether audiences are longing for a dizzily amusing satire of a vintage Hollywood genre familiar only to hard-core viewers of Turner Classic Movies is an open question, but it's fair to say that Randy Skinner's tap-happy production delivers plenty of sly amusement thanks to a ferociously talented sextet of triple threats. If this tiny show occasionally sits a little awkwardly even on a small Broadway stage, it's a small price to pay for the abundant fun on display.

The authors, George Haimsohn and Robin Miller (book and lyrics) and Jim Wise (music), gleefully channel the Warner Brothers - First National musicals of the early '30s, with their fresh-faced ingénues, fresh-mouthed chorines, and production numbers, usually staged by Busby Berkeley, that resemble black-and-white acid trips. (Key examples include 42nd Street, the biennial Gold Diggers films, and Dames. The show also borrows several plot elements from the Fred Astaire - Ginger Rogers starrer, Follow the Fleet, an RKO production.) The action follows Ruby, a dewy innocent from Centerville, Utah, who arrives in New York, tap shoes in hand, and lands a role in a Broadway chorus line. She also falls in love with Dick, a sailor from Centerville, tangles with a temperamental leading lady, and, when the theatre is lost and the show -- totally reworked, with a new score by Dick -- transfers to a US Navy battleship, she steps into the star part at the last minute. It's typical of Dames at Sea's tongue-in-cheek approach to the genre's inanities that these events all take place in a single day. As Joan, Ruby's sidekick, exclaims, "You're going out on that poop deck a chorus girl, but you're coming back a star!"

It's musical comedy madness, presented with an admirably straight face and accompanied by a cascade of insanely catchy songs that could have been cribbed from the songbook of Harry Warren and Al Dubin (Warner's in-house team), and wittily staged by Skinner. The opener, "Wall Street" ("where you'll find a rich tycoon/To croon all your blues away"), is a clever knockoff of "We're in the Money," and comes with a trio of dancing dollar signs. "The Echo Waltz" is a tasty serving of Viennese schmaltz, with chorines in dirndls leaping around with flowered hoops and discreetly yodeling. The climactic number, "Star Tar," recalls the fluent tapping and effortless charm of a great Gene Kelly production number of a slightly later era. Throughout, Skinner, Broadway's leading tap specialist, puts his performers through one fiendishly intricate routine after another -- each of which they ace with apparent ease.

No musical depends more heavily on the skill and affability of its performers, and Skinner's cast knows exactly how to handle this fizzy nonsense. In the role that once put Bernadette Peters on the map, Eloise Kropp wins over the audience by simply entering and announcing, "My name is Ruby and I'm a dancer. I just got off the bus and I want to be in a Broadway show!" Later, feeling abandoned, she amusingly trips her way through the syrupy heartbreak of the ballad "Raining in My Heart." And, when the occasion calls for it, she can tap up a fury. She has a fine dance partner in Cary Tedder as Dick, who asserts, "This cold canyon of steel and concrete doesn't scare me one bit!" He scores with "Broadway Baby" -- not to be confused with the Stephen Sondheim song of the same name -- paying tribute to that "street of a trillion dreams and a zillion tears." Taking care of the wisecracking duties is Mara Davi's Joan ("Gee, was that really Mona Kent?" "Yeah! Every bolt and rivet of her!"), who, in "Choo-Choo Honeymoon" (a variant of "Shuffle Off to Buffalo") takes part in a dazzling challenge dance with Danny Gardner, as Dick's sidekick, Lucky. (Gardner and Tedder have a fine time with the title number, in which they try to convince their commanding officer that their battleship would benefit from the addition of a few female lovelies.)

Heading up the Department of Camp, High and Low, is Lesli Margherita as the man-devouring diva Mona Kent. Glancing at one of Dick's songs for less than a second, she bellows, "It's marvelous!" Told that her name his misspelled on the marquee, she grabs a ladder and heads out to correct the error herself. She tears herself to shreds in the torch song "That Mister Man of Mine," never mind that the object of her desire is the man's money. ("Ours was a fire whose flame was too brief/Gone's my desire now that he's on relief.") She also chases amusingly after John Bolton, who, admittedly, sometimes mugs a little too enthusiastically in the dual roles of the show's producer/director and the ship's captain, Mona's old flame. In the latter role, he and Margherita vamp their way with brio through "The Beguine," in which they recall those hot Pensacola nights.

Dames at Sea, which opened in 1968 on the postage-stamp stage of Caffe Cino, was always meant to be a casual, throwaway affair, and, for its belated Broadway debut Skinner has expanded it to its limits. The inclusion of an extended dance break for nearly every number -- no matter how cleverly choreographed and fluently performed -- results in a certain predictability that slows down the first act a bit. He also treats with kid gloves the show's diciest number, "Singapore Sue," a "musical tragedy" about white slavery and dens of sin, which has been scrubbed clean of any hint of yellowface.

"Singapore Sue" is also the only number that alludes, however slightly, to the dark side of the Warner Brothers musicals. When not using his overhead camera to turn a legion of chorus girls into optical art, Berkeley's production numbers were often astonishingly perverse, with their choruses of bitter war veterans, armies of chorines shooting cannons at each other, and, in the bizarre "Pettin' in the Park" (in Gold Diggers of 1933), a set of cuties dressed in tin and partnered with chorus boys armed with can openers. The weirdest of all is "Lullaby of Broadway," in Gold Diggers of 1935, which depicts a good-time girl who, menaced by an unstoppable chorus line, is pushed off a penthouse terrace, plunging to her death. Dames at Sea would have you believe that these old films were all lightheaded fun, when many of them were marked by bizarre, often disturbing, imagery. It is the most loving of spoofs, but it doesn't really grapple with the full complexity of its source material, which may be one reason why its constant note of faux innocence sometimes runs thin.

Still, there's a delightful authenticity to the opening credit sequence, courtesy of production designer Anna Louizos, which perfectly apes the style of early-'30s films. Louizos also provides a show curtain filled with nautical references, a Broadway theatre demolished by a wrecking ball during the number "Good Times are Here to Stay," a sturdy battleship, and, for "Wall Street," an amusing forced-perspective view of New York skyscrapers with greenbacks raining down on the sidewalk. David C. Woolard's costumes combine period savvy with plenty of comic touches: Mona is the biggest beneficiary, with her gilded "Wall Street" tuxedo and a pink dressing gown with matching fur collar and cuffs that, when removed, reveals a torch singer's outfit, the skirt cut into strips. The lighting, by Ken Billington and Jason Kantrowitz, wraps everything in a warm Technicolor glow. Scott Lehrer's sound design is blessedly natural; every word of the lyrics is intelligible.

Does it matter that most theatregoers no longer recognize the names Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, and Busby Berkeley? That the clichés of a long-gone film genre are largely unknown? Possibly, but, like its characters, Dames at Sea is so full of youthful energy and skill that such questions may not matter. "Broadway, I'll lick you yet!" says Dick. And you know what? He -- and his accomplished playmates -- might just do it. -- David Barbour