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August 23, 2009
THEATER REVIEW | NEW YORK TIMES LONG ISLAND
A Joyous Sendup Bursting With Can-Do Spirit
By AILEEN JACOBSON
In the backstage musical “Dames at Sea,” the plucky actors move their show to a nearby battleship after their Broadway theater is demolished. If disaster should ever strike the Bay Street Theater, the cast could transfer to one of the many vessels docked a few yards away. Only in Sag Harbor, the ship would be a megayacht.
Nearly anything nautical is apt at Bay Street, but “Dames at Sea,” a spoof of the Busby Berkeley-style movie musicals of the post-crash 1930s, is especially apropos in the current recession.
The show, which made its debut Off Broadway in 1968 (with Bernadette Peters as the ingénue), requires only six actors to create the illusion of a big-budget Broadway spectacle. It’s an affordable pocket musical, with three musicians (under Rick Hip-Flores’s lively direction) tucked away on Howard Jones’s ingenious sets. And Bay Street, which like most theaters is feeling a pinch, takes the musical’s can-do message a step further. The costume designer, David Lawrence, explains in a program note that most of the clothes are borrowed from costume collections or Bay Street’s own crew.
Not for a moment, though, does this production look or sound like a ragtag stopgap. Ray Roderick, the director, infuses it with bubbly spirits, and Shea Sullivan’s choreography adds a high gloss, particularly in “Raining in My Heart,” a sendup featuring yellow slickers and transparent umbrellas. Throughout, precision tap and show-off somersaults create infectious joy.
Though Jim Wise’s music recalls songs from various sources, the plot contrived by George Haimsohn and Robin Miller (the duo who wrote the book and lyrics) most closely follows “42nd Street.” In that 1933 movie, a small-town gal with a yen to dance stumbles upon an ailing musical about to open and, after its diva-star suffers a mishap, takes her place, to wild acclaim. Ditto for “Dames at Sea.”
The stage version of “42nd Street,” which came to Broadway in 1980 and is frequently revived, was directed earlier this year by Mr. Roderick at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Conn., with the same actresses in the ingénue and diva roles. Kristen Martin, who plays Ruby, the ingénue (a reference, with a wink, to Ruby Keeler, the star of the “42nd Street” movie), was the innocent Peggy Sawyer at Goodspeed. Ms. Martin, exuding an appealing sweetness, delivers her lines with deadpan drollness and displays a series of kicks, splits and handstands in Ruby’s battleship debut that bespeaks a bright future.
As Mona Kent, the overbearing diva, Laurie Wells starts the show deftly with “Wall Street” and mines the comic depths of “Beguine,” in which Mona and a dashing ship’s captain (Stuart Marland) reminisce about a steamy rendezvous in Pensacola, Fla.
Ruby’s love interest, a young sailor-songwriter named Dick, is ably portrayed by Xavier Cano. Patrick Wetzel (another Goodspeed participant) plays Lucky, a sailor who is the longtime boyfriend of Joan, a brash chorus girl who becomes Ruby’s pal. Joyce Chittick is splendid in the part.
The ending? Just what you’d expect, with a song called “Let’s Have a Simple Wedding.” In keeping with the production’s inventiveness, it’s anything but.
