Music Hall Turn

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

CHARLOTTE SWEET

Books and Lyrics by Michael Colby;

Music by Gerald Jay Markoe

Music hall was for Britain what vaudeville was for an earlier America and what a TV variety show often still is: a potpourri of songs, sketches and buffoonery so good-naturedly crude that it becomes accepted as the quintessential wholesome family entertainment. Few in England remember music hall; in America, even fewer have heard anything beyond the comic ditties that used to serve to round out the hour on PBS after episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs. Yet with the passion of theater people for unearthing every oddment of stage history, an off-Broadway team has assembled Charlotte Sweet, an ingratiating pastiche that re-creates typical music hall turns and simultaneously concocts a conventional Victorian melodrama among the members of a particularly nutty touring troupe.

Nothing is subtle in Charlotte, starting with the sound; as in many current productions, the microphones have been so amplified that Gerald Jay Markoe's songs lose much of their tunefulness and practically blast back-row patrons out of their seats. Nevertheless, Markoe shows a gift for hummability in tongue-in-cheek ballads, including Liverpool Sunset and

Good Things Come, and for counterpoint in Quartet Agonistes.

Librettist Colby's campy, hit-or-miss humor works best in a scene describing the heroine's mother, a "chronic shiverer" who goes to her reward wearing enough garments to stock a branch of Marks & Spencer. Other beguiling wackinesses: a song about a man who makes eating vegetables seem a sexual experience, the vocal travails of a hiccuping, stuttering woman who has "bubbles in her bonnet," and the soprano heroine's sudden loss of her "high note," which she regains at the price of addiction--to helium sucked from balloons. In less good taste is a character called Skitzy, who talks in voices high and low, has two personalities, and eerily resembles the shopping-bag ladies who wander big-city streets.

The plot is straightforward boy-meets-girl and depends on such conventions as a villain in a top hat and rescuers in disguises (one does a drag impersonation of Queen Victoria). The stage is tiny and the choreography consequently minimal, yet in one serendipitous moment a painted cloth is lit from behind to become a foggy, gaslit, sweeping vista of a Sherlock Holmes-style England.

Director Edward Stone has set a frenetic pace that jams to a halt, like traffic in a rush-hour gridlock, whenever the entire eight-actor ensemble crowds onto the stage. The performances, though a bit broad for so intimate a space, are clever: Mara Beckerman is just irksome enough as the naive heroine, Alan Brasington swishily grand as her abductor, and Merle Louise, Polly Pen and especially Emcee Michael McCormick polished and persuasive as show-must-go-on troupers. The music hall genre may be dead, but Charlotte Sweet is an amiable, spirited resurrection.

--By William A. Henry III

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