MUSICAL REVUE: Plain Jane’s Reign Falls Mainly on the Refrain
We owe a debt to Plain Jane Theatre’s Artistic Director Kate Ryan. Who knew it?
While Curley was out there singing Oh, What a Beautiful Morning in Oklahoma – waiting in his hovel was a guy called Judd who was going to sing Poor Judd is Daid. While Robert Weede was warbling The Most Happy Fella – an actress named Jo Sullivan was getting ready to purr a song called Warm All Over. While Charles Braswell was singing, “You charmed the husk right out of the corn” in Mame in the original Broadway production, Angela Lansbury was set to deliver a heartfelt rendition of The Moon Song. All of which proves there were a lot of songs written for Broadway shows that never quite made it to the Hit Parade – but possess a musicality and charm that has kept them percolating on the back burner for many years.
What Ryan has done is return to those back pages in the pit band’s score in her sparkling new revue, Get Happy, giving us a ray of sunshine to pierce the bleak mid-winter snows of late February. Even the title sounds upbeat. It plays until Feb. 29 at the Varscona Theatre.
Ryan’s Plain Jane Theatre is the spunky little company that over the past 10 years has produced a series of big hits at the Fringe, and more recently has moved into a regular season at the Varscona Theatre. In pursuing their goal of refurbishing and mounting little-known or forgotten Broadway gems they have managed to secure 20 Elizabeth Sterling Haynes nominations – winning eight of them.
Under the inspired guidance of Ryan, the company has also archived notable success in the production of revues – written by Ryan and friends and staged with local performers. Fruitful earlier productions included Wish You Were Here, Ah, Romance and Everything’s Coming Up Chickens. For Get Happy, they have mined years of Broadway shows to come up with an imposing list of songs from shows like The Most Happy Fella, The Wild Party, Grey Gardens, The Happy Times and Tootsie. The songs are tuneful and delivered with considerable heart by an accomplished troupe – known to anyone who has enjoyed musical theatre in Edmonton: Kendra Connor, Daniela Fernandez, Kieran Martin Murphy, Jason Hardwick and Kirstin Piehl.
This is a company of equals and each gets an opportunity to shine. Ryan’s staging is spare but it gives each of the performers their moment. It doesn’t take Connor long to grab us with a patter song from Tootsie about a girl who has just blown an audition. Martin Murphy spreads a bit of warm Quebec maple syrup in The Happy Times from a long forgotten Kander and Ebb show (it bowed in 1959 starring Edmontonian Robert Goulet). Jason Hardwick generates a lump in the throat for his rendition of Larger Than Life – a song about a lonely kid whose father abandons him. Hardwick sings of how his sympathetic uncle would say, “Here’s a nickel kid, cheer up and go.” From the RKO (movie theatre) era, Daniela Fernandez cheekily re-invents Lucy’s mercurial temperament in My New Philosophy from You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Kristin Peel sings, from Grey Gardens, the sad lament of a girl between the seasons of her life, Another Winter in a Summer Town.
There are also some real upbeat moments – after all, the subtitle of the show is, “Exploring the pursuit of happiness.” Most occur when the cast gets together in duos, trios and group numbers. The opening number Sing Happy is a rouser. We’ll Take a Glass Together is a celebration of living for the moment from Grand Hotel. The rock solid accompanist for the evening is Janice Flower, and I wonder if she was responsible for the rise-out-of-your seat quartet arrangement of West Side Story’s Something’s Coming. The challenging arrangement plays fast and loose effectively with both tempo and harmonies – as if Bernstein’s music wasn’t challenging enough.
Dancers Leah Paterson and Camille Ensminger manifest that you don’t need a complete chorus line to fill a stage with brassy, energetic movement. Hardwick and Paterson do a great job on the choreography, just difficult enough to be impressive but simple enough to engage dancers and non-dancers on stage. Hardwick also gets the cute and funny songs, demonstrating his usual pixie-ish sense of humour.
Get Happy is just what we needed to get us singing and dancing – spring has come a little early this year.
Photos by May Busby
