Spoof it or spiff it up?

THE groom requested no strippers. So Bob Martin’s friends prepared a different kind of entertainment for his pre-wedding party.

They wrote and performed a brief pastiche of frothy 1920s musicals. Martin’s name and his fiancee’s were appropriated as those of would-be newlyweds in the script.

After the only performance of this spoof -- which its creators called “The Drowsy Chaperone” -- in a Toronto restaurant in 1998, veteran Second City performer and director Martin took the stage and told his friends, in the manner of a director who has just seen a difficult rehearsal, “Well, I have some notes.”

Everyone laughed. But hundreds of notes, several million dollars and seven years later, a full-evening version of “The Drowsy Chaperone” is about to open at the Ahmanson Theatre. And Martin is not only its co-author but plays Man in Chair, a present-day aficionado of antique musicals. As this faux revival unfolds, he offers, yes, notes from a 2005 perch.

Man in Chair’s comments express enthusiasm for the genre and a bygone era, but he isn’t blind to the passage of time. He wryly comments on the absurdities of the show’s story, urges his audience to ignore some of the lyrics and relates the unhappy fates of the “original’s” once-vibrant actors. It remains to be seen whether “The Drowsy Chaperone,” which had a successful run in Toronto in 2001, will find favor with L.A. theatergoers. If revivals of actual vintage shows in recent years are any indication, it may face rough going. Such productions are often met with praise for their scores yet only polite nods, if not outright disdain, for their books. This has been especially true of shows written before 1943, when “Oklahoma!” made a strong integration of story and song fashionable.

Pre-”Oklahoma!” musicals are rarely revived without some attempt to adapt them to modern sensibilities -- even in brief, noncommercial runs. Except for “Show Boat” and “Anything Goes,” they’re almost never revived commercially.

Jack Viertel speaks from two positions of authority about old-fashioned musicals. He produces short runs of them in semi-staged formats as artistic director of the New York series Encores! And as creative director of Jujamcyn Theaters, one of Broadway’s leading producers and landlords, the former critic looks for musicals with commercial potential. Seldom do the two roles merge. In 11 years, only two Encores! productions have moved to full stagings on Broadway, and both were revivals of post-”Oklahoma” musicals.

“Shows on Broadway are supposed to find a million people” if they’re going to recoup their costs, Viertel says. If audiences want to see stories about youthful romance or any “problems that aren’t momentous in a historic sense, they probably would rather see something about themselves than about their grandparents.” He cites “Avenue Q,” with its lighthearted story about contemporary young people, as “a modern equivalent of one of those ‘20s shows.”

Beyond their box-office limitations, ‘20s and ‘30s musicals are difficult to revive, Viertel says. “They were much more haphazard in construction” than later musicals. “When people try to fix them, they rarely make them better.”

The early ‘70s saw successful commercial revivals of “Irene” from 1919 and “No, No, Nanette” from 1925. And Ethan Mordden, the author of several books about Broadway musicals, says “some of the ‘20s shows are more integrated than you might think. A curio from that period might succeed simply because it’s so unlike what we get that it might seem innovative.”

But Viertel doubts that even “No, No, Nanette” could be commercially successful again. “What was quaint in the ‘70s would be ancient in the 2000s. ‘No, No, Nanette’ would be as remote as the Civil War.”

Inflammatory material

PROBABLY the biggest no-no about many of these early musicals is their use of racist, sexist or other politically incorrect material.

The original “Babes in Arms” (1937) included the number “All Dark People Are Light on Their Feet.” Shortly before he died in 1979, composer Richard Rodgers consulted on a revival of “Babes in Arms” by the Connecticut company that is now called Goodspeed Musicals, which specializes in old shows. Michael Price, who has run Goodspeed since 1968, says Rodgers told him in no uncertain terms that “Dark People” had to be cut. In another show, Price says, one of the jokes was a pun on the word “knickers” -- which by itself would need to be defined for a modern audience -- and another word that refers offensively to African Americans. “We don’t want to change the tenor of the piece, but a lot of the jokes have to come out” when such shows are revived, Price says.

Beyond such inflammatory references, the shows need revision or trimming for more mundane reasons. Viertel rattles off several titles of shows “in which someone gets hit over the head with a bottle” and is somehow transformed -- a comedy convention “that seemed to have life back then, but I don’t think it does now.”

Expected running times also have changed in the era of channel-surfing and shorter attention spans. “The average tush time in the theater then was at least three hours,” Price says. “Now it’s 2 1/2 hours including intermission.”

Scenery moves more easily now than it did in the days when curtains had to drop for set changes and when brief scenes in front of the curtain had to be devised to pass the time. Additionally, pit orchestras are much smaller now for economic reasons, so scores need new arrangements.

Still, Price says that tweaks to the originals shouldn’t be seen as heresy, because the creators of these musicals changed them often during the course of their early runs, adding and subtracting material depending on casting or other factors. “They didn’t feel slavish to their own work,” he says.

Some producers have sought to avoid the problems of the old shows yet still translate their style for modern audiences by creating new shows out of old-fashioned materials. Among the more successful efforts have been “My One and Only” and “Crazy for You,” which retained Gershwin songs but paired them with new books -- and new titles.

“Crazy for You” adapter Jerry Ludwig says he was initially given the libretto for the 1930 musical “Girl Crazy” and found it “terrible, creaky beyond what we remember. It had stereotypes of a supposedly funny Indian and a Jewish cab driver. It was a series of comedy sketches with a thread of a story, but it just wasn’t funny in a way we think is funny.” So in writing “Crazy for You,” he threw out nearly everything in the script except the basic notion of a wealthy Easterner going to the Wild West.

Taking this category a step further are new stage musicals based on old-fashioned movie musicals that were, in turn, derived from the styles of the popular Broadway musicals of their era.

“Never Gonna Dance,” which played Broadway in late 2003 and will receive its first Los Angeles-area production in February at Musical Theatre West in Long Beach, is based on the Astaire-Rogers vehicle “Swing Time” from 1936. Playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, who adapted it for the stage, encountered some of the same problems faced by Ludwig.

“We struggled with the [blackface] ‘Bojangles of Harlem’ number for two years,” he says. It was finally cut.

Hatcher also faced issues peculiar to adapting a movie, such as the need for more laugh-out-loud jokes and more songs.

Then there are the stage musicals like “The Drowsy Chaperone” that use old-fashioned styles and settings but feature new scores as well as books. One of the early shows in this mold, “The Boy Friend” from 1953, is undergoing a touring revival directed by Julie Andrews, who was the star of the first American version. “Boy Friend” creator Sandy Wilson approximated ‘20s style so closely that “he was almost using tracing paper,” says theater historian Mordden -- yet Wilson knew enough about modern tastes to keep the show shorter than most ‘20s shows. The Goodspeed-produced touring version is in two acts instead of the original three. It will play the Orange County Performing Arts Center from Dec. 20 to Jan. 1.

“Palm Beach,” which was seen at La Jolla Playhouse last summer and is aiming for a Broadway production next year, is another brand-new “old-fashioned” show. Like the talent behind “The Drowsy Chaperone,” its creators were primarily inspired by old movie comedies -- more easily available for viewing than old stage musicals -- but they acknowledge that the movies that attracted them “reflected a Broadway sensibility in a Hollywood form,” says lyricist and co-author Robert Cary.

Both “Palm Beach” and “Drowsy Chaperone” also feel halfway contemporary, despite their period style. “Palm Beach” is about “the present as told through a lens of 1939,” Cary says. “It’s about the American tendency toward hypocrisy about class and sex roles.”

More contemporary goals

ALTHOUGH “Palm Beach” looks like a typical ‘30s musical comedy, its language and references to homosexuality are more explicit than anything that would have been seen on Broadway in the ‘30s “except maybe in a Mae West comedy that might have been banned,” Cary says. “We were drawn to the elements of songwriting and comedy construction from that era, but we didn’t want to be straitjacketed by the exact formula.”

Similarly, while the creators of “The Drowsy Chaperone” use the word “homage” to describe their attitude to the material that inspired them, they note that they also have more contemporary goals. They see their show as part of the recent spate of musicals -- such as “The Producers” and “Urinetown” onstage and some episodes of “The Simpsons” and “South Park” on TV -- that comment on musicals. Lyricist Lisa Lambert says that through the character of Man in Chair, they are reflecting on “guilty pleasures and passions.”

Martin says his character “underlines that these are performers performing for you and comments on the transformation within the theatrical experience.” He sees no conflict between Man in Chair’s enjoyment of the old forms and his criticism of certain details.

Noting the wide variety of forms in the old musicals -- “chamber drama, vaudeville, operetta, dance, spectacle” -- “Drowsy” co-writer Don McKellar says, “This sense of theatrical free-for-all is one of the things we love about the period.”

But “the Man in Chair character effectively makes ‘The Drowsy Chaperone’ an integrated musical after the fact,” he adds, “and turns it into a more traditionally satisfying drama than the audience might at first expect. In a very sneaky way, we’re trying to wring an emotional and psychoanalytically sound story out of an overtly fractured show. We’re trying to have our cake and eat it too.”

*

‘The Drowsy Chaperone’

Where: Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: Opens Nov. 18. 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays. Call for exceptions.

Ends: Dec. 24

Price: $20-$90

Contact: (213) 628-2772; www.CenterTheatreGroup.org