Daily Blague

The Drowsy Chaperone is an extraordinarily vibrant solution to the problem of what to do with Broadway's troupes of highly talented musical comedians in an unstylish age. Resuscitating the old chestnuts, as both Girl Crazy and Crazy For You showed, doesn't really work: the old shows - every musical by Cole Porter written before 1948's Kiss Me, Kate, for example - are dramatically lame. Truth to tell, the audiences of the Twenties and Thirties demanded much less of musical comedy than we do. So where are today's vehicles for divas as endowed as, say, Sutton Foster?

Thoroughly Modern Millie - the last show that we saw at the Marquis, and the last time that we saw Ms Foster - was a merely adequate solution. The songs were thoroughly forgettable, and it was hardly more possible to care about the cardboard characters, exhumed as they were from shows that David Merrick wouldn't have considered backing. The show got by on youthful cheek and charm. It ran much longer than I thought it would. Harriet Harris was great in the Bea Lillie role, especially when she wore that outfit in a huge red dragon print (she did, didn't she?). Otherwise...

I expected The Drowsy Chaperone to be much the same. But people talked about it with a different kind of enthusiasm. They hadn't just enjoyed the show, they'd liked it. Eventually, I decided that we had to see it, and I'm glad that we did, because it is a very special, and deeply moving, musical. Perhaps the most moving musical ever.

Once upon a time, gay men had to behave just like straight men. This was tough, needless to say, and it naturally created an underground world, one in which ...

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