With its emphasis on presenting Broadway musicals on the Suncoast, Golden Apple is just the right home for The Musical of Musicals (The Musical). Spoofing the scores, scripts, and styles of musical greats makes a little plot go a long way. Five long ways, to be exact, via as many short plays.
Using the theme of Rent, the story finds a heroine who can't pay hers to her landlord villain unless she weds or beds him. Or she may be out of danger if, mostly owing to advice from a sage older woman, heroine gets together with a hero who'll pay the rent for her.
Under a proscenium arch, lined with parodies of familiar musical titles, are trunks, stools, a ladder, chairs, clothes racks. Changes of hats and accessories await to suggest complete costume variations. To one side, vaudeville-like "act" posters on an easel get changed with each playlet and its caricatured creators.
Though each of the mini-musicals is original, they capture the essence of the works of Rogers and Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, Jerry Herman, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Kander and Ebb. "Corn" is immediately recognizable as a variation on Oklahoma! with sub-themes mainly from The King and I, Carousel and South Pacific.
Like much of Sondheim's output, even the title of "A Little Complex" has a double meaning: The play's laid in a multiplex called "The Woods" where live a mess of mental defectives.Pseudo-sophisticated Abby screams atonally the end of every song line, especially when drunk.
As for the rest, "que Seurat, Seurat." Abby's really a Dear, though, on various staircases just meant for Jerry Herman ladies with all the answers, plus headgear and boas. Aspects of Juanita shows the heroine menaced by a Phantom (who can't write opera). He uses a piano bench as a boat while maintaining "everything I do is a big production." This time the staircase is for a Gloria Swanson type of Abby, and the hero is one Cats' meow.
Perhaps the audience's favorite skit, "Speakeasy" presents a scene that looks pretty much like the Kit Kat Klub transferred to "Chicago." Kip Taisey, a slick song-and-dance man who plays the villain (Jidder, Jitters, Phantom Jitter) in most of the pieces, is the consummate Jutter, greeting in various languages including pig Latin. Sweet ingenue Jessica Hanson trades her previous pink chiffon for a slick black chorus girl's outfit. This time Billy, her would-be savior (wonderfully strong-voiced William Garon), is Villy and can't pay Juny's rent very quickly because he's in jail. Sensational Cara Herman's Fraulein Abby's advice is "Sell your body." Nothing phases John Visser, making music onstage throughout (except for one time as Roller-Skating Pianist).
Luckily, all the characters come together finally in a salute to another musical as "(d)One," done by the very able chorus of four stars in golden high hats. Major musical fans may want to see the show more than once to "get" all the references and humor.
