STAGE REVIEWS : ‘Crazy Words, Crazy Tunes’: Crazy Show

If you’re a member of the generation that danced the Dipsy Doodle or chuckled “To Hear Veronica Play Her Harmonica on the Pier in Santa Monica,” you will adore “Crazy Words, Crazy Tunes” at the Center Stage Theatre in Woodland Hills.

The fifty- and sixtysomething audience that packed opening night picked up on each number and helped turn the evening into a wacky musical feast celebrating novelty songs of the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s.

Created by Milt Larsen and Gene Casey, the show is hilariously performed by an animated quartet (Mary Gillis, Eric Leviton, Lloyd Pedersen and director Pamela Hall). What separates the production from merely another nostalgic revue is the performers’ effortless sense of period style and their unpretentious, comedic skills.

Not only do they have voices, and hoofers’ feet, as in “Beat Me Daddy Eight to the Bar,” but they’re facile, mercurial actors, particularly Leviton and Pedersen. With musical director Casey knocking out the tunes from a stage-side piano, the room hip-hops to swift, zany melodious diversions that once brightened the days of Prohibition, the Depression and World War II.

Hosted by the irrepressible Gillis, who introduces the various trends and alternately breaks into comical dances, the show quickly plunges into sultry mayhem with a characteristic South Pacific number, “Jungle Drums,” complete with Hall in grass skirt and bongo-crazed natives riotously banging out feverish rhythms on the tops of wooden stools. The same trio suddenly reappears as the Andrews Sisters in those great ‘40s hairnets.

Wisely, the arrangements are all tightly telescoped into musical montages. At the same time, the quicksilver demands on the performers propel them into fast-changing medleys that leap from “food songs” (“Yes, We Have No Bananas,” “One Meatball!”) to songs about musical instruments, including an obscure Jazz Age ditty, “If I Give Up My Saxophone, Will You Come Back to Me?” warbled by Pedersen in a black and yellow checkered jacket that looks like it was won in a shell game. Otherwise, the men are formally dressed in tuxedos--a wry touch, considering the bizarre material.

“Cocktails for Two,” a hit that was a direct response, we’re told, to the lifting of Prohibition, is revived in its silliest rendition ever, the memorable Spike Jones wartime version, with Leviton wonderfully re-creating all the goofy sound effects. Leviton later uncurls a funny homage to Nelson Eddy, crooning “Chloe” under a Mountie’s hat.

For the crowd who remembers “When Huba Played the Tuba Down in Cuba” or, moving from flappers to bombers, “Mairzy Doats” and “Flat Foot Floogie,” this is a show that will lighten the years. It recalls the frolicsome humor, the showmanship and the corn in songs that momentarily kept a nation’s mind off darker things.

If younger patrons discover this show, they will find it as rewarding as a pilgrimage to a movie revival house and favored screen classics of the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s. Where else can you find Veronica playing her harmonica on the pier in Santa Monica?

“Crazy Words, Crazy Tunes,” Center Stage Theatre, 20929 Ventura Blvd., Woodland Hills. Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Runs indefinitely. $17.50. (818) 904-0444. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.