'Pajama Game' Is Wide-Awake Fun

'Pajama Game' is wide

awake fun

REVIEW

By CHRISTOPHER POTTER

NEWS ARTS WRITER

Sassy and brassy and jokey and tuneful. If “The Pajama Game” -currently playing at Lydia Mendelssohn, courtesy of Ann Arbor Civic Theatre - doesn’t offer much more, that’s still a load of goodness.

Bravo to director/choreographer Ronald P. Baumanis for resurrecting this keystone 1950s American musical, which swept the Tony Awards nearly half a century ago but isn’t performed nearly enough today.

Had this Romeo-and-Juliet-like romance between lovers on opposite sides of a factory labor dispute been formulated in the Depression-ridden 1930s, it would likely have been a didactic, power-to-the-workers tragedy/triumph. But by the mid-’50s America’s postwar economy was booming, life seemed both good and safe (despite those nasty Russians), and what could be more fuzzily appealing than a show centered on pajamas?

Baumanis and his talented Civic actor/singer/dancers clearly understand the essential frivolity here, pushing for the same laughs George Abbott, Harold Prince and Bob Fosse (among others) did back in 1954. “The Pajama Game” clocks in at just over two hours, an astonishingly swift pace: That’s probably appropriate given that the musical’s plot evolves out of the efforts of an efficiency expert, Professor Hines (played by Anthony J. Provenzola) to speed up employees’ work output at the Sleep Tite Pajama Factory in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

In a politically oriented show, Hines and the factory’s profits-obsessed Boss (Dave Feiertag) would be arch villains. Not so in “Pajama Game,” in which the Boss -played with grand, bull-headed authority by Feiertag - dances happily at the annual company picnic and ultimately folds at the slightest threat to his well-being.

And far from a slave-driving whip-cracker, Hines is a goofy guy who could have stepped straight off a vaudeville stage. A worrywart about his semi-loyal secretary-girlfriend Gladys (Emily Phenix), the rubber boned Provenzola goes through all kinds of literal flip-flops. He even wears a vaudevillian checkered suit, the pants of which he drops at one point to test a pair of defective pajamas. When Gladys helps her sweetie re-don his trousers, they get stuck in a howling physical comedy riff that intentionally upstages the concurrent dialogue of other characters.

That’s just one of the joys of this production that moves without a breath of wasted air. Baumanis underscores the vaudeville by often closing the Mendelssohn curtain and having performers do numbers sans set. Yet “The Pajama Game” never loses its plot thread, as new factory superintendent Sid Sorokin (Kevin Binkley) and union grievance committee head Babe Williams (Melissa Henderson) fumble their way into romance despite an imminent strike that could tear them apart.

This assembly-line love story is
genuine, and it’s Binkley who makes one care. A wooden thespian and so-so singer a few years back in Civic’s “The Sound of Music,” Binkley has mastered a whole new words-and- ; music presence: His tough-but-ten- ’ der Sid is utterly in sync with the ’50s plethora of musical stars in the Drake/MacRae/Raitt/Keel macho mold. His singing voice is now a wonder of versatility, soaring from baritone into high tenor on Sid’s great love song, “Hey There.”

Sadly, leading lady Henderson doesn’t pull her weight. A petite actress, she registers hardly any Babe-like moxie and passion. She’s overshadowed by Phenix, who clearly has a ball as flirty Gladys: Whether shooting off one-liners, dancing female lead in the famed Fosse-cum-Baumanis “Steam Heat’ or doing a wild parody of a ballet at the company picnic, she’s a joy to watch.

Juanelle Roberta Celaire’s undernourished orchestra needs a tune-up, but the cast does splendid choral justice to Richard Adler and Jerry Ross’ wonderful song score. Take “Hernando’s Hideaway,” performed in near-total darkness as cast members wink flashlights on and off under their chins - a creepy wonderment that’s just one of the marvels in this very non-arthritic musical classic.

"The Pajama Game" continues at 8 p.m. tonight and 2 p.m. Sunday at Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre, 911 N. University Ave. Tickets are $18 general, $16 students/seniors. For details call (734)971-2228.