Soldiers preparing to ship out overseas from San Francisco typically spend their last 24 hours drinking and whoring, not wasting time on a Frat-house stalk-and-snare mission—especially when it's 1963 and the fresh-out-of-boot-camp corpsmen are bound for a tiny Southeast Asian patch called Viet Nam. Credibility, however, wasn't the goal of the 1991 film, Dogfight, nor of the 2012 musical adaptation, so much as the attempt to replicate the tone of a mid-1940s song-and-dance G.I. comedy within the hindsight context of a war not yet begun.
Such cognitive dissonance requires a thick layer of wistful nostalgia, provided by a retrospective ballad serving as a prologue to our first glimpse of former Marine corporal Edward Birdlace, whose flashback introduces us to his buddies, Boland and Bernstein, and the plan proposed by their fellow jarheads on the eve of their departure to hold a "dogfight" competition, its object being to rendezvous at a predetermined destination, accompanied by the most unattractive women they can muster up. Birdlace's search leads him to a shy, guitar-strumming, peacenik waitress named Rose, whom he decides will do. Upon discovering the reason behind his invitation, Rose upbraids the cruel pranksters, declaring that she hopes they all die in combat. As military atrocities go, injury to feminine self-esteem is relatively mild, and a later incident involving a gang-assault on an uncooperative prostitute, while repugnant by enlightened 2015 standards, can be dismissed as a by-product of the perpetrators' recent immersion in a testosterone-fueled subculture. Even so, Birdlace's conscience spurs him to vow remorse to the wronged damsel, who accepts his apology, whereupon the two embark on a montage of young-lovers-in-the-big-city checkpoints. Come morning, Birdlace resigns himself to a future where his comrades will, indeed, die, and he, himself, will be wounded and return in 1967 to seek comfort in the arms of the patiently waiting Rose. It might be inevitable that Boho Theater's production should suffer ambivalence toward its material. Despite locating details like the vintage trapeze dress worn by Boland's escort, a 90-second jungle firefight, and a score of period incidental music not including "For What It's Worth" (kudos to Theresa Ham, Tony Churchill and Amanda Hosking, respectively), the actors still appear reluctant to embrace the uglier aspects of their milieu—actual USMC haircuts, say, or fluency in gruntspeak. For any but the fuzziest memories of the era under scrutiny, the resulting Hollywood romance-in-uniform propaganda emerges as too nebulous to convey the emotions its authors strive to evoke.
