STAGE REVIEWS : ‘Forever Plaid’ Returns, Potent Nostalgia Intact

Unlike that famous rock star from the ‘60s, the tux-clad vocal quartet on stage at the Canon Theatre in Beverly Hills is hot, not so sexy and dead.

This is a group in the tradition of the Four Freshmen--indulging in a letter(men)-perfect return to the era of earnest four-part arrangements of “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing.”

They’re “Forever Plaid”--the group name as well as the title of the returning musical/comedy--and a little bummed out about having been deceased for 28 years, but not too much more than they would be about any other major career setback.

As a brief opening voice-over tells us (and as the boys themselves later candidly discuss), they’ve been drifting through the cosmos ever since being hit by that bus of Beatles fans on the way to their first professional gig in ‘64, but some act of providence or hole in heaven has allowed them to finally return to premiere that great lost act--kind of like a pre-Fab Four pop “Brigadoon.” Happily, they have no awareness that they’ve arrived back smack in the middle of history’s Madonna Moment.

This kind of camp would seem the stuff of a “Saturday Night Live” skit more than a 100-minute revue, but the players sustain its complete length easily and brilliantly, more than accounting for the show’s immense popularity Off Broadway, at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego and the Pasadena Playhouse last fall. At least half the humor comes through the retrospective naivete of the group’s choreography, during (mostly) straightforward renditions of tunes like “Three Coins in the Fountain” and “Shangri-La”; quite miraculously, the shtick is as funny in the last 10 minutes as it was during the first 10.

Some of the highlights come when great pop icons are being invoked--a la Perry Como, with the lads’ semi-mythic “story of the golden cardigan,” or Ed Sullivan, whose breakneck tribute number (with the four actors paying five-second homage to seemingly every magician or acrobat who ever graced the series) is a shew -stopper of mammoth proportions.

More than anything, though, “Forever Plaid” is a tribute to its fictional quartet’s own anonymity, and to every dreamer who never made it but had a few moments of unwitnessed glory in the practice room anyway. In the process, it briefly revives with utter exactitude a bygone musical genre filled with certainty --moral, harmonic and otherwise. And it’s pretty much certain that this show, unlike its late heroes, will get its due.

‘Forever Plaid’

Stan Chandler: Jinx

David Engel: Smudge

Larry Raben: Sparky

Guy Stroman: Frankie

An Old Globe Theatre presentation. Producers Veronica Chambers, Joan Stein, Gene Wolsk, Steven Suskin. Director-playwright-choreographer Stuart Ross. Sets Neil Peter Jampolis. Lights Jane Reisman. Costumes Debra Stein. Musical director Steven Freeman. Musical continuity/arrangements James Raitt. Stage manager Peter Van Dyke. Sound Tony Tait. Associate producer Tom Hall.