STAGE REVIEW : Fooling Around With ‘Tomfoolery’--and Loving It

The roar of approval that greeted the final bows in “Tomfoolery” at the Gem Theatre on opening night Friday was not only rare but well deserved.

Wild hurrahs, coming as they did from middle-of-the-road playgoers rather than opera buffs who have a tendency to rave, guarantee that word-of-mouth on this show will be better than it has been for anything the Grove Theatre Co. has done all season.

Not that previous offerings, such as the critically underrated “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” haven’t deserved popularity; nor that its perennial holiday favorite, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” hasn’t drawn predictable “oohs” and “aahs.”

But this musical revue of Tom Lehrer’s satirical songs from the ‘50s and ‘60s shines by comparison for the sheer pleasure of its wit, which is tellingly evident even in the patter between the more than two dozen songs.

Have the Boy Scouts (“those noble little bastions of decency”) ever been better described? Has war nostalgia been abused with more grace in a quip? (World War II “produced a lot of hit songs, although it was not primarily a musical.”)

The songs themselves, far from being dated, are as pertinent as when they were written, particularly Lehrer’s fabled sendups of environmental pollution, nuclear annihilation, sexually transmitted diseases, pornography, drugs and religion.

In some cases, his lyrics have gained from the passage of time. Inferences about Hollywood’s gift to politics in “George Murphy,” a song about the late U.S. senator from California that should have shriveled with age, have acquired fresh piquancy because of Ronald Reagan’s years in the White House.

“The Elements,” a zippy catalogue of Earth’s basic substances from helium to uranium, is lent a certain timeliness by current headlines about “cold fusion.” Lehrer’s dubious additions to the periodic table (“linoleum and condominium and two of my personal favorites, Librium and Valium”) might have been discovered by chemists in Utah.

In case you’ve never heard of Lehrer, he’s a former Harvard math professor now teaching at UC Santa Cruz. He used to perform in the ‘50s at such hip clubs as Hollywood’s Interlude and San Francisco’s the hungry i. In those days and in those places satire wasn’t what closed on Saturday night, George S. Kaufman’s famous witticism notwithstanding.

The inimitable songs of “Tomfoolery” boggle the mind not only with their benign mockery but also with their variety. Lehrer scoffs in all genres of song: the pastoral style (“Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”); the dear-heart school of writing (“My Home Town”); tunes with a calypso beat (“Pollution”); folk-song lampoons (“The Irish Ballad”); torch-song spoofs (“The Masochism Tango”); war satires (“So Long, Mom . . . I’m Off to Drop the Bomb”); and the pull-out-the-stops finale (“The Vatican Rag”).

For all the virtues of the material, “Tomfoolery” would not have bowled over the crowd without performances full of verve and charm. A fine ensemble of five actors--Gary Bell, Michelle Loven, Rick Franklin, Cherie Brown and Jeff R.W. Stevens--delivered gloriously. They put over each of the 27 songs as if their lives depended on it. And they did it with polish.

But one thing this show does not have is too much polish, thank God. The low-gloss production avoids being glib or slick, both of which would be antithetical to Lehrer’s material. This enables the performers to absorb some unintended rough edges in the staging and still come off first-rate. The result is terrifically entertaining.

‘TOMFOOLERY’

A production of the Grove Theatre Co. at the Gem Theatre, 12852 Main St., Garden Grove. Words, music and lyrics by Tom Lehrer. Adapted by Cameron Mackintosh and Robin Ray. Staged by Thomas F. Bradac and Cyrus Parker. Music direction by Chuck Estes. Set by Gil Morales. Lighting by David C. Palmer. Costumes by Laura E. Deremer. Sound by David M. Darwin. Through June 17. Tickets $13-$17. For curtain times and reservations: (714) 636-7213.