STAGE : Can’t Get to the ‘Opera’? Try the ‘Symphony’

You’re in town for a quick weekend and you can’t get tickets to “The Phantom of the Opera”? Cheer up, it’ll be in Los Angeles sooner or later. Meanwhile, how about “Oil City Symphony”?

I admit the title lacks cachet. Nobody back home will be impressed when you casually mention “the night Alvin and I saw ‘Oil City Symphony’ in New York.” Oh, really? Some kind of industrial film?

Nor are tickets being scalped for $200 a pair. “Oil City Symphony” isn’t a blockbuster. It’s just a nice little off-Broadway musical by the people who created that earlier nice little off-Broadway musical, “Pump Boys and Dinettes.”

But, for the susceptible, it touches chords--dare I say heartstrings?--that a big-cannon show like “Phantom” or “Les Miserables” can’t. If you miss “Prairie Home Companion,” you’ll love “Oil City Symphony.”

And if you abhorred “Prairie Home Companion”--Middle American virtue, ugh!--you’ll hate it. However, it’s a hard show to hate once the visitor is in the middle of it, at the Circle in the Square Downtown. He may even find himself doing the hokey-pokey.

That’s the dance where you put your whole self in and shake it all about. It’s quite something to see a theater full of New Yorkers doing the hokey-pokey. In real life, half of these people would deny that they had even heard of the hokey-pokey. How does “Oil City Symphony” get them off their high horse?

By throwing itself at their feet. The show is so guileless that even a New Yorker would feel like a rat standing around sneering at it, when he ought to be helping it out. Fifteen minutes later, he is in its power.

The scene of “Oil City Symphony” is a high school gymnasium in Oil City--wherever that is. Probably Texas, since that was the scene of “Pump Boys and Dinettes.” But it might also be in Oklahoma, or Kansas, or for that matter Maine. All high school gyms are the same place.

This one, designed by Jeffrey Schissler, isn’t up on the stage. It’s all around us--backboards, State Championship banners, rows of metal seats. Another night we might be in the bleachers cheering on the basketball team, but tonight there’s a concert by the Oil City Symphony.

A little joke there. Actually they’re a combo: two guys, two gals. They started playing together in high school back in the ‘60s. Since then their lives have gone in various directions--as people say when they don’t want to get too specific.

Now everybody is back in town and in a mood to give show business another shot. This is their comeback concert, you might say, and they only hope that we’ll enjoy listening to their music as much as they enjoy making it for us.

Some of them are too nervous to have any fun at all, but they do put on an enjoyable concert, with something for everyone, as will be reported next week in the Oil City Weekly Independent.

Old favorites include “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” “Czardas,” “Dizzy Fingers” and “The Theme from ‘Exodus.’ ”

New favorites include “The Beehive Polka” and “My Old Kentucky Rock and Roll Home.” The reader hasn’t heard of those songs, because the actors made them up, but they blend right in.

Add “The Hokey Pokey” for audience involvement, and “In the Sweet By and By” for piety, and you have the perfect heartland musicale, so perfect that some readers are already nodding off.

But trust me, it’s fun. And not such dumb fun as it may sound. The idea isn’t to mock the Oil City Symphony as a bunch of dull hicks who can’t stay in tune. They do stay in tune--mostly. As musicians, they know what they’re doing.

The fun is the naivete of their material--I hadn’t heard “Dizzy Fingers” since I played it in a piano recital as a kid--and their earnest attempts to be flashy and show-bizy, as with the purple ties on the guys. They look like wedding ushers in the ‘60s.

The name of the game here is small-town satire, and “Oil City Symphony” never entirely gives it up. But even as you’re smiling at the characters, they’re growing on you. Each embodies a stereotype, to be sure. Mark Hardwick, for instance, as the nerdy pianist with the big Adam’s apple who still lives with his mother. Or Mary Murfitt as the prim violin teacher who is petrified that she will lose her practice if she screws up.

But within the cartoon, you start to see a face--to sense a story. It’s a strength of the piece that it doesn’t push this. We learn, from the introduction to a song, that Mike Craver went off to San Francisco during the “summer of love,” but we don’t know how long he stayed there, or why he has come back to Oil City.

But a certain absence in his manner suggests that he took a beating out on the Coast and hasn’t quite recovered from it. Playing with the old gang is therapy for him, but it’s possible that he won’t have the stamina to stay with the group as a regular thing, assuming they get more gigs.

That could be the viewer’s imagination, as could be the sense that Debra Monk’s marriage is going through a bad patch. She’s the Doris Day of the group (if you can visualize Doris Day playing drums as well as doing vocals) and all her intros are as cheerful as a lark. But something’s not working for her at home anymore.

Or maybe things are fine. Still, it’s safe to say that the members of the Oil City Symphony realize that high school was a long time ago. This gives an unexpected poignancy to the moment when they pin an orchid on their old music teacher sitting out there in the audience, the one who brought them together so many years ago.

“Miss Reeves”--who might be a nuclear physicist from Brooklyn Heights--finds herself falling right in with the fiction, and the audience finds itself ridiculously touched. How many spoofs end up with the viewer believing them? The cast serves punch and cookies in the lobby, and it’s a shock to find Bleecker Street on the other side of the door, rather than Pioneer Avenue SW.

There’s a tougher alternative to “The Phantom of the Opera” as well: “Sarafina” at the Cort Theatre.

This comes from black South Africa. The book and direction are by Mbongeni Ngema, creator of “Asinamali.” The songs are by Ngema and Hugh Masekela. The cast is a group of black high-school kids, and the story concerns just such a group of kids in Soweto in the late 1970s, many of them jailed by the white South African government, some of them killed.

For what? For being fresh, for being young, for refusing to start re-conducting their educations in a new language, Afrikaans. But anyone who attempts to find an argument in “Sarafina,” or even a plot, is in for trouble. It’s strictly a mood piece, the mood containing equal parts of anger and jubilation, not seen as opposites here.

The show generates an enormous energy in the theater, but it tends to repeat itself. It would work better as a long one-act than it does in its present form. The kids are unstoppable, especially in chorus--that big, open sound would unclog any listener’s sinuses. Trust me. “The Phantom” isn’t the only show on the block.