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Come and meet those dancing feet in 'Dames at Sea'
Newsday
August 17, 2009 by STEVE PARKS / steve.parks@newsday.com
If you love cornball, break-a-leg musicals, you'll enjoy "Dames at Sea." But if Busby Berkeley movie musicals are not your thing, you may like "Dames" even more. Especially as cleverly mounted by director Ray Roderick and his comically adept cast at Bay Street Theatre.
An off Off-Broadway sleeper that gave Bernadette Peters her first break in 1966, "Dames" is a takeoff on "42nd Street" (now playing at Hofstra's John Cranford Adams Playhouse), the story of a kid just off the bus from Nowheresville who gets her chance to "go out there a chorus girl and come back a star" after the diva she replaces actually breaks a leg. In "Dames," the diva is seasick and the ingenue goes out onto the poop deck instead.
The Broadway baby wannabe is Ruby, played by Kristen Martin with a beguiling innocence that redefines the ingenue role and makes it her own. She has left her suitcase at the bus terminal, but an admiring sailor retrieves the luggage and follows her to the theater, where a new show starring Mona Kent is opening. The sailor (an eager-to-please Xavier Cano) just happens to be a songwriter, too.
He composes a score for Mona - a lacerating diva played by Laurie Wells, who has almost as much fun as we do when she mows down anyone who treads into her spotlight. She slays us all with "That Mister Man of Mine." The only one who cuts Mona down to size is a plucky chorine (Joyce Chittick), who knows the star's real name. Her sailor boyfriend (Patrick Wetzel) and the director/ ship's captain (Stuart Marland) complete an ensemble that'll have you believing there's a chorus backing them up on the umbrella dance (comic choreography by Shea Sullivan) surrounding Ruby's straight-faced "Raining in My Heart."
Howard Jones' backstage set, crumbled by a wrecking ball - it's the Great Depression, after all - is transformed into a battleship deck, with matching cannons, as the show must go on in time for Mona's drama-queen swoon and Ruby's poop deck debut.
Musical director Rick Hip-Flores, costumer David Lawrence and lighting designer Charlie Morrison prep us for improbable romance and show-biz razzle-dazzle.
"Dames" is a laughably adorable victory at sea.
WHAT "Dames at Sea," book and lyrics by George Haimsohn and Robin Miller, music by Jim Wise
