Off Broadway: Friends from the '30s

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OFF BROADWAY

Ideally, a parody should be: 1) funny about its subject matter, 2) funny in its own right, and 3) funny but not unfriendly. Dames at Sea, at Manhattan's Bouwerie Lane Theater, manages to be all three—with a bonus of three thoroughly engaging stars and some of the most ingenious staging currently on or off Broadway.

Director Neal Kenyon and Set Designer Peter Harvey had to be ingenious. With a ministage and a cast of only six, they set out to spoof the movie musicals of the 1930s, with all their intricate dance routines and big, glittering production numbers ("lavish" was the Depression word for them). One clever device is a movable frame inside the proscenium that makes the stage even smaller than it is, so that it can then be expanded to produce the illusion of large-scale operations. Another nice trick is one pair of panels at stage center that slide open to reveal a Chinese opium den, and still another pair that revolve to present canted mirrors, giving the tiny chorus line something of that old Busby Berkeley thundering herd effect.

Were it not for television, of course, only doddering fogies of 50 and older would get the point of the takeoff. But the late-late shows have brought into the public domain the venerable cliches about naive little Ruby who comes to the Broadway "jungle" determined to "tap her way to stardom." All the familiar old friends are on hand—the bitchy established star who tries to steal Ruby's sweetheart, the warm-hearted floozy who befriends her, the gruff, tough director who puts her on at the last minute with those classic words: "It's a chance in a million, but it just might work." Everything else is there too—the whiplash body English and frenetic tap routines, the hard-times songs about riches-to-rags and good-times-acomin', the Spanish-town song ("Do you remember those nights of splendor"), the train song ("Clickity-clackity-woo-woo") and the rain song ("Pitter-patter-what's-the-matter").

Tamara Long, as the slinky heavy, brandishes a flaming Morganitic torch for her Mister Man, and Sally Stark, as Ruby's peroxided pal, belts a note almost as plangent as the great Merman's. The comic delight of the show, though, is Bernadette Peters, whose Ruby can simultaneously sing and dance up a storm that puts all New York (including Queen Mane of Rumania) at her feet. She can also lament her unrequited love with a tear that streaks mascara down her cheek in a lugubrious perfection of timing.

It's hard to believe that none of them ever thrilled to a dance marathon or unwrapped a Melorol.