STAGE REVIEW : ‘Band’ Strikes Up a Look at Today

We’re in a bigger, better war For your patriotic pastime. We don’t know what we’re fighting for-- But we didn’t know the last time!

--”Strike Up the Band”

Most Gershwin musicals in the 1920s were soap bubbles, as can be seen from their titles: “Funny Face,” “Oh, Kay!” Not “Strike Up the Band” (1927), in which American boys once more go across the Big Pond, in order to defend American cheese against the hated Swiss variety.

The acerbic George S. Kaufman wrote the book, a man with no patience for fools in real life, but a great appreciation for their value in musical comedy. Take the scene where the President’s confidential adviser reveals, confidentially, that his boss hasn’t been informed about the war yet. “I just went ahead without him.”

One doesn’t know how that line went over in 1927--this version of “Strike Up the Band” never got out of Philadelphia--but Avery Schreiber got a big laugh with it Saturday night at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. Shall we say, a laugh of recognition?

If “Strike Up the Band” was a show ahead of its time, it was also very much a show of its time. That’s clear from the California Music Theatre’s revival, which borrows two or three numbers from the show’s 1930 Broadway version (“Soon,” for instance), but mostly sticks to the original, insofar as musical theater-archeologist Tommy Krasker has been able to piece it together.

We are not talking “Threepenny Opera” here. We are not even talking “Of Thee I Sing.” It’s a song-and-dance show, patched with tap numbers, boy-girl duets and places for the low comic to come out and stop the show. The idea is to send the audience home humming, not debating the cheese tariff. It’s 1927, and nobody is seriously thinking of going to war again. That’s why it can be made fun of.

Isn’t there something dismaying about the final curtain, when the band once against strikes up and the boys go off to defend American caviar? Yes, slightly--Ward Carlisle’s lights register foreboding at Pasadena--but not enough to stop us from tapping our toes to Gershwin’s great title march.

War is as silly as a musical comedy: Maybe that’s message enough. Director Gary Davis has hired some fine funnymen to get the message across, starting with Tom Bosley as a man who thinks cheese, cheese, cheese day and night (that’s how you get to to the top in

America), but doesn’t know that his own cheese is made with Grade B milk. Selective ignorance, it’s wonderful.

Bosley’s knowledge of his lines on opening night, however, was a bit too selective, at one point spreading to Schreiber, who was otherwise delicious. The show should tighten up considerably through its Pasadena run, which will be followed by engagements at the Orange County Performing Arts Center and the Music Center.

Saturday night, it wasn’t quite the sum of its parts. But what parts! One absolute pleasure--and these don’t need tightening--were the tap numbers, staged by Randy Skinner and led by Kirby Ward, who might make you think of George M. Cohan as he goes through his close-order drill routine.

You’ll also notice Ward’s wife, Beverly--Ginger to his Fred--in their dance duets. But it’s Roxann Parker who wins your heart as Bosley’s debutante daughter, a dear girl who simply goes to pieces to think that the Man She Loves (Michael Magnusen) could accuse her father of using Grade B milk. “Oh, Jim! How could you?”

This may be the funniest line in the show. But Kaufman was in wonderful form here, as in Bosley’s “All I had starting out was a pound of cheese and the memory of my mother. My mother had a very poor memory.” Ah there, Dr. Quackenbush.

Faye DeWitt , Donald Most and Bobby Herbeck (the low comic mentioned above) are given equally bizarre exchanges, and know what to do with them. Steven Smith provides appreciative support from the orchestra pit--a conductor who actually seems to enjoy the show. As always at Pasadena, the miking is horrible.

Plays Tuesdays-Saturdays at 8 p.m., with Saturday-Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. Closes Aug. 14. Tickets $15-$37.50. 300 E. Green St., Pasadena ; (213) 410-1062 or (714) 634-1300. Plays Aug. 18-24 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center ; (213) 480-4343 or (714) 740-2000. Plays Aug. 26-Sept. 11 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion ; (213) 972-7211.