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Get ready, Cleveland! Get ready for the brightest, funniest and most celebrated musical of the 2006 Broadway season, THE DROWSY CHAPERONE. Running October 16-28, THE DROWSY CHAPERONE kicks off the 2007-08 KeyBank Broadway Series at Playhouse Square, transporting Cleveland audiences into a magical, wonderful world. A totally new and original musical within a comedy, THE DROWSY CHAPERONE has “more laughs per minute than any new show on Broadway” (WWOR-TV), the most 2006 Tony Awards of any musical on Broadway, and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle and Drama Desk Awards for Best Musical! THE DROWSY CHAPERONE spent four weeks at Playhouse Square this summer rehearsing and “teching” the entire show in preparation for the tour. The cast and crew then headed for Toronto, where the show had been the sleeper hit of the 1999 Toronto Fringe Theatre Festival. Now it’s coming back to Cleveland to begin its U.S. tour of more than 30 cities. Ben Brantley of The New York Times dubbed it “INGENIOUS! Few productions have ever pulled an audience so immediately and unconditionally on their side.” The show is built on one singularly comic concept: the essence of having a theater fan play his favorite original cast recording, a 1928 extravaganza, for the audience. Never mind that there wouldn’t be an original cast recording of a 1928 show -- there were instances of recordings of individual songs by members of original casts, but generally speaking, the practice of recording the entire score of a Broadway musical the way it was presented in the theater didn’t begin until Oklahoma! more than a decade later. Never mind that the fabulous Tony-nominated orchestrations use a larger pit band than would likely have been used in 1928. This isn’t a history lesson about musical comedy – it is a musical comedy! And both musical and funny it is. The score is a light and lively collection of 1920s Broadway songs, the script a lampoon of the light musical style of the day, and the performances parodies of the standard star-types of the decade. THE DROWSY CHAPERONE tells the story of a modern-day musical theater addict known simply as “Man in Chair.” To chase his blues away he drops the needle on his favorite LP – The Drowsy Chaperone. From the crackle of his hi-fi, the musical magically bursts to life onstage, telling the tale of the pampered Broadway starlet who wants to give up show business to get married, the producer who sets out to sabotage her nuptials, her chaperone, the debonair groom, the dizzy chorine, the Latin lover and a pair of gangsters who double as pastry chefs. It’s easy to see why Variety calls it “IRRESTIBLE! A witty, winning, REFRESHING COCKTAIL OF A SHOW!” Synopsis As the curtain rises, the first few minutes take place in complete darkness as a voice drifts from the stage: “I hate theater,” the voice says. “Well, it’s so disappointing, isn’t it?” This voice, which belongs to a character called Man in Chair, offers up the prayer he says he always mutters before a show, requesting that it be short, free of actors who roam the audience and blessed with “a story and a few good songs that will take me away.” Man in Chair is a mousy, vaguely depressed Broadway musical fanatic whose coping mechanism involves listening repeatedly to a recording of a favorite 1928 stage musical, The Drowsy Chaperone. By the time the first note sails out of his speakers, he’s been transported to a magical dream world, one where the actors in the recording enter his dingy apartment and transform it into a glorious show palace complete with seashell footlights, sparkly peacocks, glittery sugarplum trees, and costumes that would put Flo Ziegfeld to shame. The show-within-the-show centers on a vain showgirl who is about to marry a man she only just met and her cigar-chomping producer who doesn’t want to lose his valuable starlet. What follows is a pastiche of every clichéd plot thread ever written, including mistaken identity, spit-takes, gangsters on the lam, a campy all-knowing English butler, a Latin lothario and a daffy, cartwheeling heroine. Watching from his armchair, Man in Chair is torn between his desire to absorb every moment of the play as it unfolds and to insert his own personal footnotes as he continuously brings the audience in and out of the fantasy.
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