While built on a whimsical premise and light as a feather, Forever Plaid is true to the frilly, silly postwar period it evokes and gently satirizes. The production brims with good humor, marvelous singing and clever staging. It is a delight for anyone with a tinge of nostalgia for (or curiosity about) pop culture of the 1950s.
In the opening moments of Forever Plaid at the Walnut Street Theatre’s Studio 3, a quartet of men, carrying candles and looking lost and frightened, enters through the audience, literally from out of the past or the moment on Feb. 9, 1964, when they died in a collision with a bus full of parochial-school girls on their way to see the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show.
Their performance has an irresistible charm. The Four Plaids, played by Fran Prisco, Marshal Drew, Chip Klose and J. Andrew Keitch, never making it to their first professional gig, now get a second chance. Providence grants their ghosts a return to earth to have that moment in the spotlight. The Plaids sing like the angels they are, but they perform with an ingenuous amateurishness that’s at once captivating and hilarious.
Equal credit for the success of this effective contrast must go to creator Stuart Ross and director Dale Sandish for their clever bits of business built into Forever Plaid. You won’t find a more diverting and satisfying 90 minutes of lovely music and
heartwarming humor guaranteed to put a smile on your face.
When the Plaids, a mythical 1950s male quartet from eastern Pennsylvania, perform a piece of vintage kitsch like Three Coins in the Fountain, they don’t merely sing it in smooth four-part harmonies that echo the Four Aces; they physically illustrate the lyrics with a painstaking literalness that simulates the words.
This is just the sort of thing that squeaky-clean harmony groups of the 1950s like the Four Lads, the Crew Cuts, the Four Aces and the Ames Brothers actually used to do in their performances. But the Plaids exaggerate it just enough to make it all seem as playfully surreal as their own fateful biography.
Over the course of the evening, the group — which sports matching plaid cummerbunds and bow ties — fantasizes about the musical career it might have enjoyed had it not been cut short. Among many funny bits, the group offers its version of the Beatles’ She Loves You (in which "yeah, yeah, yeah" becomes "yessiree, Bob") and tells the story of "the golden cardigan," the sweater that Perry Como left behind after he was stranded in their hometown. The cardigan has become an icon to which the Plaids croon letter-perfect renditions of the Como hits Papa Loves Mambo and Catch a Falling Star.
The production context in which they conjure up their doo-wops and evoke the shades of Como, Johnnie Ray and Harry Belafonte is energizing and winsome. The three-minute evocation of The Ed Sullivan Show, touching every clich� that still makes that variety show memorable 40 years after its demise, is a masterpiece of compression.
Underneath its mockery of ’50s squareness, Forever Plaid oozes nostalgia for the decade of the button-down mind and affection for its ultra-sanitized pop. Drew, Prisco, Klose and Keitch have refined a harmonic blend that is as tonally precise and dynamically controlled as that of any of their ’50s antecedents.
While Rob Blackwell’s piano arrangements do not exactly duplicate those of the original hit records, they offer a skillful pastiche of a style that the Plaids explain they developed at the Osterizer School of Harmonic Theory. It was there that they learned the four basic modes of vocal harmony: blend, puree, mix and chop — and this charming serenade shows them to be more than adept at all four functions.
When one Plaid plaintively said, "I wish we didn’t have to go back," we wished they didn’t have to leave, either. What undoubtedly sustains interest is director Sandish’s unflagging inventiveness in making the stage come alive with distending plants, neon-lit bananas, etc. This is what, in the ’40s, they called a "stage show," the last desperate wheeze of vaudeville before it gave way to monster musicals. As such, it is a superior specimen of its kind.
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Forever Plaid
Walnut Street Theatre
Studio 3
825 Walnut St.
Through Dec. 22
Tickets: $17-$24
215-574-3550
