FRINGE 2019: Foote in the Door tackles the ’50s with fun, soul and heart
The Marvelous Wonderettes ’58
Stage 27 (Hi-Edmonton Hostel)
Oh horrors! It’s a disaster. It’s 1958 at the Springfield High School prom (Go Chipmunks) and the entertainment for the evening was to be the hot guy quartet called the Crooning Crab Cakes. But the group can’t make it because the leader was caught smoking behind the girl’s locker room. In a fortunate turn of events, at the last moment the errant boys are replaced by a back-up quartet of local girls in bobby socks, saddle shoes and crinolines. The girls are an unlikely mismatched group called The Marvelous Wonderettes.
There’s the energetic tomboy Betty Jean (Stephanie Bent), the teen-queen Cindy Lou (Ruth Wong-Miller), the really sincere Missy (Christina O’Dell) and everyone’s favourite, the flighty Suzy (Joyanne Rudiak). Each has her own personality. Betty Jean is a gleeful troublemaker. Suzy is ga-ga over Rick the cute lighting guy. Missy has a crush on Mr. Lee, the teacher.
Like its worthy predecessor Forever Plaid, The Marvelous Wonderettes ’58 takes us back to the ’50s and the bubble-gum world of early rock, doo-wop, pop, and rhythm and blues. Perhaps this pre-Beatles epoch wasn’t a great time for pop music, but it was tuneful, upbeat and, for older patrons, this show is a Happy Days compendium of memory with iconic songs like Why Do Fools Fall in Love, Mr. Sandman, Lollipop, Dream Lover, Good Night Sweetheart and a terrific high-drama delivery of Secret Love by O’Dell. As Cousin Brucie used to say, “The hits just keep on comin’!”
So does the laughter, – mainly generated by the now outrageous looks and attitudes of the time, but also from an effervescent production that is genuinely funny. Director-choreographer Melanie Lafleur is much too young to have been there but reconstructs the experience when you fell in love for the first time to All I Have to Do Is Dream, made out in the front seat of Dad’s old Studebaker at the drive-in to Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me and finally said goodnight after necking on the front porch to the strains of Goodnight Sweetheart. Her choreography is so right it could have found its way onto Ed Sullivan.
Some in the quartet have classically-trained voices but they have toned down the vibrato, timbre and weight to trill like they were coming out of the song factory in the Brill Building in New York circa 1956. They have fun with it all.
The Marvelous Wonderettes ’58 is the work of the highly regarded local company, Foote in the Door Productions, and the four performers, with the help of their accomplished accompanist Stephanie Urquhart, have located somewhere behind all that fifties fou-fou and folderol something of a beating heart.
4 out of 5
