The audience greeted curtain calls with cheers, but for this reviewer at least, Musical Theatre Guild’s one-performance-only concert staged reading of the 2006 Broadway hit The Drowsy Chaperone failed to live up to the company’s next-best-thing-to-fully-staged standards.

It’s easy to see why The Drowsy Chaperone appealed to MTG as a follow-up to last fall’s spectacular The Light In The Piazza.

Despite a couple of major local productions in the early 2010s, this love letter to musical theater no longer packs the regional theater box office potential it once had, making it ripe for MTG treatment.

 It’s also that rarity among musicals, one that divvies up stage time almost equally between a dozen major characters, thereby providing plenty of meaty roles for MTG members.

As to whether the show (music and lyrics by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison, book by Bob Martin and Don McKellar) actually lends itself to the concert staged reading format, at least as presented on the Eli and Edythe Broad Stage, the answer to that is a qualified no.

 In recounting the events surrounding the upcoming nuptials of Broadway star Janet Van de Graff (Ashley Moniz) to oil tycoon Robert Martin (Matthew Patrick Davis), The Drowsy Chaperone takes us from the living room of Golden Age Broadway aficionado Man In Chair (Michael Kostroff) to one posh country estate locale after another, and though a fully designed set would be out of the question in a concert staged reading, there was little sense of where each scene took place at Sunday’s performance.

It didn’t help that director Lewis Wilkenfeld (whose previous MTG collaborations, Mame and High Society among them, were unqualified successes) had the cast simply standing side by side across the stage for extended periods of time on more than one occasion.

Janet ’s “Show Off” didn’t work nearly as well minus the multiple props she normally manipulates, or the sound gag that has her continuing to sing while swallowing a glass of water, or making a dazzlingly fast costume change mid-number.

Mrs. Tottendale’s (Barbara Carlton Heart) repeated spit take is a surefire laugh-getter when Underling (Robert Yacko) actually gets drenched with “ice water,” but falls flat when glass and vodka are simply mimed.

And though it makes sense to scale back dance numbers given the mere 25 hours of rehearsal allowed by Actors Equity for a concert staged reading, The Drowsy Chaperone features too many of them for choreographer Heather Castillo and her cast to truly do the show justice, though Castillo does find an ingenious solution to “Accident Waiting To Happen,” a number that usually has a blindfolded Robert roller-skating around the stage.

I’m not sure why MTG omitted the deliberately, hilariously politically incorrect “Message From A Nightingale” (“with the permission of the rights holder”), but its absence was missed by this reviewer after having relished it in ten previous productions.

 Lastly, on a more minor note, what happened to the grand finale interaction between Man In Chair and the matinee idol he’s been crushing on since the first time he heard the Original Broadway Cast recording of the musical we’re seeing unfolding through his eyes?

All of this is not to say that MTG members (and one guest artist) didn’t perform fabulously.

 They most certainly did, with best-in-show honors shared by the delicioso star turn delivered by Trance Thompson as Latin lothario Aldolfo, and the captivating Moniz giving role originator Sutton Foster a run for her money.

The uniquely talented Kostroff made Man In Chair very much his own creation, if not the gay-coded show queen I’ve come to know and love.

Davis and Joshua Finkel (George) had a nifty tap number in “Cold Feet,” though I wish more had been made of the  height difference between MTG’s answer to Tommy and his more compactly built dance partner (and every other cast member for that matter).

 Diane Vincent made for a fabulously blowsy, drowsy Chaperone, Heart and Yacko were delights in roles originated by the inimitable Georgia Engel and Edward Hibbett, Kevin Symons and Jasmine Ejan (as impresario Feldzeig and dumb brunette Kitty) and Will Collyer and Leslie Stevens (as a couple of gangsters pretending to be pastry chefs) scored vaudeville-style laughs, Gabriel Navarro had an amusing eleventh-hour cameo as The Super, and guest artist Elizabeth Adabale showed off her USC-honed power pipes as grand finale stunner Trix The Aviatrix.

Music director Brad Ellis and the band did their best to take the place of a full Broadway orchestra, and Jeffrey Schoenberg’s costumes were character-and-period-appropriate, if considerably more limited in number than a full production would provide.

Melissa Lyons Caldretti is production coordinator. Leesa Freed is production stage manager and production manager. John W. Calder III is stage manager and Stacey Cortez and Christopher Roskowinski are assistant stage managers.

 I’m guessing that many if not most in Sunday’s audience didn’t mind that The Drowsy Chaperone was less “fully staged” than previous MTG productions had led me to expect it would be. And it may be that by its very nature, this particular musical poses challenges that others have not.

Still, after a The Light In The Piazza that felt as completely realized as any full production I’d seen of it, and a Follies that was a “Concert Version” in name only, The Drowsy Chaperone, though not without its charms, left me wishing for more.

The Eli and Edythe Broad Stage, 1310 11th St., Santa Monica.
www.musicaltheatreguild.com

–Steven Stanley
March 23, 2025
Photos: Stan Chandler

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Tags: Bob Martin, Don McKellar, Greg Morrison, Lisa Lambert, Los Angeles Theater, Musical Theatre Guild, The Broad Stage