A packed house had a fine time at "Hellzapoppin," The American Century Theater's production of the almost-never-revived 1938 vaudevillish comedy, but it was kind of difficult to figure out just how many tickets the company had actually sold.
The reason? The show is famous for using plants in the audience, so many of the seats were occupied by actors and actresses. When it came their time to interject nonsense into the tomfoolery on stage, they contributed to the manic sense of fun that is very different from the more formally structured, tightly controlled shows now called "musical comedy."
"Hellzapoppin" wasn't like anything else on Broadway at the time it opened. It was a collection of sketches, spoofs, running gags, single jokes, outrageous puns and parody songs sung all the way through or just played long enough for a single gag — one elderly songster tries to remember the words to "Try to Remember" and gives up after singing just the title.
The comedy team of Ole Olsen and Chick Johnson, almost as famous in their day as Abbott and Costello but not as famous as Burns and Allen, had the biggest hit of their career with this unexpectedly successful assemblage of time honored (or time worn) vaudeville shtick. It ran for over two years on Broadway, opening during the depths of the depression and only closing after the start of World War II. By the time it closed 10 days after Pearl Harbor, it was the longest running musical comedy in Broadway history.
It wasn't the same every night for those two years. Indeed, it was probably never the same on any two nights - Olsen and Johnson played to the specific audience, adjusting their material moment by moment to suit the mood of the house.
THE MOOD OF the house for the revival, at least at the matinee we attended, is absolutely "anything goes." One of the famous bits from the original which is retained here is the audience participation raffle where first prize was a 25 pound block of ice placed in the winner's lap. The American Century Theater repeats that and one lucky patron found himself with a big bag of party ice on his lap for most of the second act.
Bill Karukas recreates the persona of Ole Olsen, the straight man who presides over the foolishness with sorely strained forbearance. In the comic role of his partner Chick Johnson, Doug Krenzlin has some truly funny moments but also a few when the pauses between punch lines go on too long and the logic of his lunacy seems to escape him.
The pace of the show seems spotty, with periods that drag between
periods of intense fun. The second act has most of the best material. This is the act that has the famous growing tree gag in which an usher, played with wonderful whimsy by Evan Crump, wanders through the audience with a plant to deliver — each time he comes in, the plant has grown bigger until finally he's struggling with a full size tree.
Perhaps the funniest individual bit is performed with great energy by John Tweel who, as "The Great Howdiddi," dons a straight jacket in a classic escape trick that goes wrong.
THE AMERICAN Century Theater has assembled this approximation of what the original show might have been like on any given night out of the lone remaining copy of an original script (which probably wasn't followed on any one night anyway), the memories of people they interviewed who either were in the show at one time or at least saw it, and snippets from the movie version Olsen and Johnson released just after the Broadway version closed.
Since so much of the humor involved was topical, this version uses updated gags (the courtroom scene is punctuated with the well known thump-thump sound of TV's "Law & Order") and doesn't attempt to revive the music from the original. Instead, there are lampoons of songs many will recognize and a few real stretches. If my ears served me right, I recognized material ("A Pox On The Traitor's Brow") from one of the shortest running Broadway musicals, "Drat! The Cat!" and a comedy routine once performed by Mike Nichols and Elaine May.
This is entirely in the spirit of the original, however. Olsen and Johnson made a career out of appropriating and then embellishing material that had worked for others. Most of the material in this new incarnation works and lots of laughs are to be enjoyed.
Brad Hathaway reviews theater in Virginia, Washington and Maryland as well as Broadway, and edits Potomac Stages, a Web site covering theater in the region (www.PotomacStages.com). He can be reached at Brad@PotomacStages.com.