If you took a real 1920s Broadway musical with a screwball plot and a score by second-tier writers (no Gershwins, Irving Berlin or Cole Porter here), where the big tearjerker ballad is all about putting a monkey on a pedestal, and many of the actors ham it up as if they were on helium, it would probably sink on Broadway as fast as “The Rock Hamlet” did (one performance). But do a nostalgic send-up spoof of one, with some postmodern touches, and you’ve got The Drowsy Chaperone, the musical that won five Tony’s for the 2006 Broadway season and is at the Peace Center through Sunday.

When the play opens we hear a voice on a dark stage declaring “I hate theater. Well, it’s so disappointing, isn’t it?” But it turns out this character, Man in Chair, played by Jonathan Crombie, just doesn’t like today’s theater, including musicals like Miss Saigon and Cats! that his apartment super loves. He likes the old shows, musicals from the 1920s that are short, “with a story and a few good songs that will take me away. Now it’s ‘Please, Elton John, must we continue this charade?”

Man in Chair, when we finally get to see him, is a definite theater type, someone you’ve probably met if you’ve ever studied in a college drama or literature department, lived in Manhattan or even read The New Yorker regularly. One New York critic called him a “show queen,” but you have to know that show queens aren’t necessarily gay, although they definitely are queenly, if shyly so like Man in Chair. But what makes him a “show queen” is not sexual orientation but theater facts compulsion; he’s a fan as in fanatic, who can tell you everything about the cast of a musical, even a 75-year-old one, dishing the dirt on how they died and who they had affairs with.

When the lights go up we find ourselves in Man in Chair’s modest if cavernous studio apartment, where he’s just putting on the LP (that’s 33 1/3 rpm vinyl – and in a nice marketing gimmick, the LP as well as a CD of the cast recording from Broadway is available) of his favorite obscure musical, 1928’s The Drowsy Chaperone, on his turntable. Here’s the show’s postmodern conceit and nifty framing device: Having the show come to life in the apartment/stage as Man in Chair plays the disc and, increasingly as the show progresses, comment on and even interact with the musical taking place.

The preposterous plot, about a Broadway producer’s attempt to put the kibosh on the wedding of his show’s female star, is peopled with odd-ball characters like the title one, to whom “drowsy” is a synonym for drunk (a drunkenness she celebrates in her big number), as well as an identical twin pair of gangsters posing as pastry chefs, a Latin lothario who acts like he’s still a silent film star, and a black aviatrix. Then there’s the toothsome groom, who tap dances with his best man; the obligatory dumb (like a fox) blonde, and a scatter-brained older woman, Georgette, played by Georgia Engel, still sounding a lot like Ted Baxter’s ditsy girlfriend on TV’s The Mary Tyler Moore Show, whom she played.

The musical numbers are just absurd enough to be amusing and fun, but become delightful when Man in Chair butts in with his commentary (Sample: Pornography and musical theater are the same, he tells us, as both use plot simply to get to the good parts). During the “Bride’s Lament” he gets so transported he shadows the female lead as she sings, singing right along himself. Costumes, like the acting, are over-the-top. There’s even a politically incorrect, hilarious faux Chinese number that wanders in from another “musical” LP that mistakenly gets put on the turntable. That’s one of a number of clever uses of the spinning disc conceit in the show. Others include a skipped groove, so the action keeps repeating, a section Man in Chair keeps repeating because it’s his favorite, and a blackout, when the apartment’s electricity dies.

At just over an hour and half running time (no intermission, thank you), snazzy production numbers (Did I mention that airplane to Rio in the last scene?), and Man in Chair’s wry, arch and catty comments, The Drowsy Chaperone is a delightful musical theater bon-bon.
Find show information at peacecenter.org

George Kanzler was Critic at Large, covering performing arts and jazz, for The Beat, the Upstate’s now defunct alternate weekly. He contributes to magazines, including Jazz Times and Hot House, and has been a syndicated music and arts critic when he worked for a major metropolitan newspaper. His idea of heaven is where Duke Ellington’s music is played and Shakespeare’s plays are performed — all the time.