Swit Dreams
Loretta Swit seems to be having a great time at the helm of Song of Singapore, the faux-retro musical at The New Theatre Restaurant. The fourth M*A*S*H veteran to appear at a local dinner theater, Swit gets to shimmy and shake across the bandstand of the waterfront saloon, taking to the grooves like a doomed duck to an egg roll. But it all comes to a crashing halt when she starts to sing. She may be blessed with rhythm, but nary a dulcet tone parts from her lips.
The show is credited to five hands: Erik Frandsen, Michael Garin, Robert Hipkens, and Paula Lockheart for music and lyrics, and the same four plus Allan Katz for the book. The songs sparkle enough but there’s an oafishness to the book that scoops up bad puns (such as the use of “Holy mackerel” to comment on a plot twist involving a fish) and anachronistic jokes (such as one about Miss Saigon) in one indiscriminate haul. They’re all kind of thrown at the audience like balls to a bowling pin on a carnival midway, yet, in this game, no one’s winning any prizes.
The setting is 1941 at a club called Freddy’s Song of Singapore Cafe. The proprietress, Chah Li (pronounced “Charlie”), played by the spunky Andi Meyer, says of the audience and the band, “The more they drink, the better they sound.” No soldiers wander in, but a nosy Inspector Kurland (Francis Kane), who is on a hunt for lost jewels, does. And thus the plot is completely outlined. Audience members may need to go home and play “Merrily We Roll Along” to restore their faith in compelling musicals.
Rose (Swit) has landed at this gin joint in a fog; a preposterous mystery to her journey is revealed in the second act that presupposes one’s belief in amnesia. (Does anyone in real life ever get amnesia?) The rest of Freddy’s house band is there just because; none of their stories merit a moment of stage patter. The closest the authors come to giving anyone but Rose a back story is having Hans van der Last (Billy Grey) pining “I Miss My Home in Haarlem” — the Dutch one, apparently, not the New York one, as evidenced by the spelling. But what the jewels and a dead fish potentially offer unites the cast one and all: a chance to leave the island.
The band also includes co-author Frandsen as Spike Spaulden, Elio Pace as Freddy S. Lyme (say his middle initial and last name quickly and he gets miffed), Steve Barrett as Kenya Ratamacue, Jeff Harshbarger as Taqsim Arco, Harold Steinhardt Zoot DeFumee, and Stephanie Cox as T-Bone Kahanamoku. If the writers had spent as much time on the story as they did the characters’ names, there might have been a chance at a decent show. The musicians do get a couple chances to assert themselves through the jazz- and Asian-influenced score — that is, when the fish and the jewels don’t push them out of the way.
Swit’s performance would be a camp classic if it weren’t so unintentionally hilarious. As energetic as she is, there’s a catastrophic pitch problem that turns such numbers as “Harbour of Love” and “I Remember” into mating calls for screech owls. The “Star Spangled Banner” performance she delivered at a recent Chiefs game was blatant star-fucking and an insult to every local actress with a phone.
Separate from the fairly awful vocalizing, the character of Rose is all over the place: She’s an idiot with a baby voice, then — through some hypnosis hocus-pocus — a butch aviatrix out of an old movie serial, then back to the bimbo.
Randy B. Winder’s lighting design is actively diverting, especially the lanterns that hang throughout the theater like atomic mandarin oranges. Jarrett Bertoncin’s set is like a band shell of silk and bamboo, and it conveys tons more atmosphere than does the show. Mary Traylor’s costumes sample such wardrobe archetypes as sarongs, zoot suits, and jungle khakis, though Swit’s midriff-revealing sequined number in the first act is cruel and unusual.
The waitstaff for this production get a break from the starchy white shirts and are adorably sporting authentic Hawaiian shirts from HiloHattie. Sous-chef Wayne Cox lays out an Asian buffet offering the meatiest cashew chicken ever tasted, and crunchy egg rolls fill in where dinner rolls usually sit. The highlight of the show was, alas, not on stage but on the table — the chocolate cobbler, where an Arctic scoop of ice cream lolls atop a hot fudge brownie. As the textures and temperatures became indistinguishable, all things under the spotlight were forgiven.
The Agony and the Ecstasy: The University of Missouri-Kansas City Theater Department’s 2000-01 season kicked off last week with a Kansas City premiere. Ecstasy, written in 1978 by the esteemed British filmmaker Mike Leigh (Secrets and Lies, Naked), opened with two naked people having one of those postcoitus “now what do we say” moments. There was lots of drinking, cursing, and smoking (though the latter was an unimaginative and unnecessary attempt to accessorize wholly unlikable characters — and it looked phony), as well as plenty of moody lighting and existential silences — pace-killers in this case. And the wobbly accents needed much work and, thus, didn’t work much. “What a waste of time,” said a woman at intermission, who surely got in on the senior discount. Ditto.
