Last week’s highly enjoyable Tower Players production of The Drowsy Chaperone was a surprising exploration of how individuals understand art and apply it to their own lives. The frame narrator, a character known only as Man in Chair (played by the engaging, ever effervescent junior Matthew Sauer) walks the audience through his beloved recording of “Gable and Stein’s ‘The Drowsy Chaperone’”, looking for a record (on nostalgic vinyl) to help him through his night troubles of “feeling a little blue . . . a little anxious for no particular reason, a little sad that I should feel anxious at this age, you know, a little self-conscious anxiety resulting in non-specific sadness: a state that I like to call ‘blue’.” Through the play, we learn about his history: his parent’s divorce, his own messy separation from his wife, and how he’s learned to interpret his own painful experiences through “The Drowsy Chaperone” as a relic of a simpler, bygone age: the worldwide party of the 1920s. At the emotional climax of his night with the musical, Man in Chair says:
You have to understand, I love this show so much. My mother gave me the record. This was before my father left us. He didn’t leave because of the record, although I’m sure it didn’t help matters. Look I know it’s not a perfect show; the spit take scene is lame and the monkey motif is labored. It does what a musical is supposed to do; it takes you to another world. And it gives you a little tune to carry with you in your head. Something to take you away from the dreary horrors of the real world. A little something for when you’re feeling blue. You know?
These two lines from Man in Chair, taken together, reveal the deeper structure of The Drowsy Chaperone, and the statement it wants to make about art. When the show begins, Man in Chair seems to be looking for a great, fun musical (as opposed to the contrived contemporary theatre he constantly bemoans) that will help him cope with his ‘blueness’ and take him back to the 1920s.
Throughout the production, however, we see more and more how flawed “The Drowsy Chaperone”, the actors behind it, and the world they inhabited was. He reminds the audience constantly of the arbitrary plot and musical numbers as well as the vanities, hangups, and sometimes tragic future fates of the Original Broadway Cast. As soon as something is celebrated for its innocence or fun, Man in Chair cannot help mentioning a different, darker perspective. This structure is established almost immediately: Man in Chair describes the 1920s as a decadent world “when the champagne flowed while the caviar chilled and all the world was a party — for the wealthy anyway.”
As it turns out, escaping to 1928 is not the pure “time machine” which Man in Chair desires. He himself cannot help second-guessing the escapism he clearly craves, showing how “The Drowsy Chaperone” is “not a perfect show”, nor a remnant of an innocent world as he initially describes. The reason he loves the show as much as he does, he explains that it is important to understand, is that his mother gave him the record at a central point in his childhood. While the escapism of the show is imperfect in many ways, the choice he makes to believe that the message of the musical (actually unintelligible on his record) is “love while you can” is the way he grounds the show in the meaningful realities of his own experience. He interprets the tragedies of his life and his existential blueness through the ultimate optimism that the show embodies for him. Finally, the meaning Sauer’s character imputes to the play shows that while it is just as flawed as his life, in a moment of uncertainty he can choose the better meaning and find “A little something for when you’re feeling blue.”
