Can our righteous Hero, Edward Middleton - Ren Lescault - (Yay!) - kick his drinking habit (miraculously acquired with that first sip) and win the troth of the comely Mary Wilson - Melinda Messenger - the Heroine (Sigh!)? Can our Heroine thwart the dastardly Lawyer Cribbs' - Robb Tracy - (Hiss!) attempts to foreclose on her cottage in which she and her recently widowed, grieving Mother, Mrs. Wilson - Kate McLaughlin - dwell? Will we laugh until we spill diet Coke, popcorn and chilidogs over our jeans?
In the performance of “The Drunkard,” a temperance melodrama written in 1844 by W.H. Smith, adapted and staged by Ken Parks, with original music by Parks and Robb Tracy for the recently-opened All American Melodrama Theater and Music Hall down in Shoreline Village, the answer, like Molly Bloom’s soliloquy that concludes James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” is yes, yes. Yes!
It’s a rambunctious undertaking, this production, thoroughly enjoyable. With the theatre’s entrance that faces the harbor closed off, and the stage painted blue, yellow, and red, you’d think you were in San Francisco’s Barbary Coast, not a waterfront mall that sells hot sauce, hats, cigars, and candy in a barrel.
The small round tables push up against the stage, the live piano music swells up to the low-hanging rafters, and you get the feeling that you’ve stepped back about 150 years, where entertainment was legible and available, cheap if not moral. There were no spitoons that I could see.
It’s got the requisite stereotypical characters (two-dimensional, very black –villains – and white – heroes and heroines), the exaggerated emotions (hammy Dudley Do-Right declarations of love and fealty, Snidley Whiplash exhibitions of greed and duplicity), and simplistic conflict (chicanery versus the right-thing).
The story was written at the beginning of the American temperance movement – what a clever conceit – humiliate the scourge of liquor by its identification with crooks (read lawyers) – and was quickly adapted into the movement’s popular cultural propaganda. Bet you didn’t know that teatotaling P.T. Barnum, who only served iced water at his productions, debuted the show in 1849 into his New American Museum and so great was its reception that he expanded his auditorium to accommodate the audience.
Here, though, it’s fun and games. The performances are delightfully over-the-top. he Hero’s especially funny: when he’s drunk, he resembles Soupy Sales. The actors are quick to play off the audience. One little kid provided a hilarious running commentary on the action on-stage. It’s remarkably innocent, this story and its enactment, without irony, ambiguity, or special effects.
Innocent, too (think Laugh In) is the short vaudeville revue that follows the show. It consists of four sketches: Boy Meets Girl, A Good Man is Hard to Find (including one female’s incursion into the audience to remark that, while one particular’s critic’s no-longer-blond hair suggested snow on the mountain, his all-too-apparent desire suggested fire in the furnace), a Comic Song, and The Finale.
Performances are 7:30pm, Thursday & Friday, 4:30 and 8:30pm, Saturday, and 7pm, Sunday. The show runs until August 24. Ticket prices are $14-18. The Theater is located at 429 Shoreline Village Drive Suite E. For more information on their next production, “Bedlam at the Ball Park or ‘Field of Schemes,’” which opens August 28, call 495-5900 or visit www.allamericanmelodrama.com.
