Musicals

Chaps is a hilarious musical comedy, set in WWII, where the Tex Riley and his Radio Roundup singers are scheduled to perform for a war-weary, eager audience. When things go awry, and the “cowboys go missing,” the Brits... are forced to improvise and act out as American cowboys on the range, for the show must go on. The irony here, given the historical backdrop of friction between the British and Americans (dating all the way back to the Revolutionary War) makes the premise of the show priceless!

In times of war, when reality is often dark, lonely, and gloomy, a radio or road show (a la Bob Hope’s USO Road shows) is an attempt to enliven and empower the troops’ spirits. Chaps is a hilarious musical comedy, set in WWII, where the Tex Riley and his Radio Roundup singers are scheduled to perform for a war-weary, eager audience. When things go awry, and the “cowboys go missing,” the Brits (stereotypically accustomed to a “stiff upper lip,”) are forced to improvise and act out as American cowboys on the range, for the show must go on.

The irony here, given the historical backdrop of friction between the British and Americans (dating all the way back to the Revolutionary War) makes the premise of the show priceless!

The ensemble, led by the classy Leslie Briggs-Stratton (Jeffrey Markle), and accompanied by a smooth, harmonic live band, are hilarious and entertaining as rag-tag cowboys in this rip-roaring Country-Western extravaganza.

The show ends up as a laugh out loud hootenanny, with slapstick physical humor, impromptu gags, and a sensational sound effects guy who chimes in right on key.

The British performers, transformed from London West End to the Wild West … had to improvise “out of their hats and boots,” literally, in the heat of battle — all in the name of entertaining the troops. A true show-stealer is Mabel Halliday (Debbie Lowe), with a quality of voice and stage presence comparable to Ethel Merman in Annie, Get Your Gun.

She is an energetic pistol, a song and dance dynamo, with a spectacular voice and charming country drawl. Reprises of old western standards are refreshing and wholesome, with a menu of old time cowpoke faves, like “Ragtime Cowboy,” “I’m an Old Cowhand,” and “Jingle, Jangle, Jingle.”

Adding a nice touch is home-made baked goodies and warm cup of cocoa, coffee or tea at intermission. Chaps is pure, wholesome family fun for a pre-Veterans Day autumn afternoon or evening of amusement.

It’s not often that the words “cigareets and whiskey and wild, wild women” turn up in a Christmas show.

But Chaps! A Jingle Jangle Christmas is no ordinary Christmas show – and that’s all to the good.

It’s not often that the words “cigareets and whiskey and wild, wild women” turn up in a Christmas show.

But Chaps! A Jingle Jangle Christmas is no ordinary Christmas show – and that’s all to the good.

There’s no bah-humbugging in Chaps!, no errant nuns, no drummer boys or Macy’s Santa Clauses or foul-mouthed reindeer. All you’ll see on the Orlando Shakespeare Theater stage is a bunch of singing cowboys – or actually a bunch of singing Brits dressed as cowboys, trying valiantly to bolster the Christmas spirit through the London blitz when the real singing cowboys don’t show up for a radio show being broadcast live to the troops at the front.

If you think that sounds sentimental, well, that’s the road not taken by director Patrick Flick and his nifty band of actors and musicians, who rely nearly all of the time on a whole lot of comic chops and some major musical talent. What they’ve wound up with is as quirky a Christmas show as you’ll find – funny, nonsensical and just sweet enough to get you through the holidays with a smile on your face.

The setting is a BBC radio studio in 1944, where the production staff is waiting for a band from Texas to show up and perform their show for the troops. The problem is none of the Texans turn up but Mabel Carter (Melissa Mason), the stage manager – which forces the stiff-upper-lipped Brits to join Mabel in putting on the show themselves.

So you hear a lot of cowboy songs – “I’ve Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle,” “Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds” – sung in accents that range from plummy (Philip Nolen, as the announcer Leslie Briggs-Stratton, vaingloriously rolling his r’s) to lowbrow (Michael Gill, as the Cockney sound engineer Archie Leitch, desperately broadening his vowels but forgetting not to over-enunciate his t’s). You get terrific work from a three-piece band (Ted Henderson on guitar, Matt Tonner on bass and Daniel Flick on fiddle and mandolin), with Gill out front also on guitar. And you get just a hint of sweetness when Mason sings a beautiful, simple version of “White Cliffs of Dover,” blended with the rest of the cast on “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.”

The show – with a handsome radio-studio set by Bert Scott, which has its own surprises in store, and plenty of cowboyesque costumes by Mel Barger – doesn’t bear a whole lot of exploration. There may be no clear reason why all these fearful BBC types drop their inhibitions and plunge into their Texas twangs, and said twangs, along with the British accents they’re wrapped around, come and go with regularity.

But it doesn’t much matter when you can sit there in the audience and watch the mobile faces of a band of really good actors – the expressive eyebrows of Nolen and of Michael Edwards as the radio show’s veteran ham; the poker face of the nearly mute Brandon Roberts as Stan, the sound-effects guy. Mark Whitten is full of energy as Miles Shadwell, the show’s desperate young producer; Gill and Mason have enough musical panache to do a show all by themselves.

And Nolen, one of the most versatile of Orlando’s actors, seems to throw himself effortlessly into the role of the nincompoop, the stuffed shirt who lets loose so recklessly that he doesn’t mind showing up on stage as a bargirl named Belle Starlet, looking for all the world like Captain Hook in drag.

That’s a sight you’re not likely to see in most Christmas shows, and it may not be a vision you want to hold onto for many Christmases to come. But this time around, it’s every bit as appealing as a vision of sugar plums – not quite so sugary, but welcome all the while.

"In the heat of the moment, devoted to the same worthy common goal, men and women working together as a team can accomplish marvelous prodigies — things they never knew they were capable of before. That’s the heart-warming message of Chaps! A Jingle Jangle Christmas, now at Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte through tomorrow. "

In the heat of the moment, devoted to the same worthy common goal, men and women working together as a team can accomplish marvelous prodigies — things they never knew they were capable of before. That’s the heart-warming message of Chaps! A Jingle Jangle Christmas, now at Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte through tomorrow. Come to think of it, that’s the heart-warming message of 1940s Radio Hour and, more recently, Live from WVL Radio Theatre: It’s a Wonderful Life. This little trilogy could actually be performed in rolling rep on the same stage with the same set, without overburdening righteous Christians with too many messages.

 Yes, Chaps! is also set in a radio station, but this one is the BBC during World War 2. Transportation to London is messed up, so Tex Riley and his country western buckaroos have been unavoidably detained. Their Christmas concert, beamed out there to the brave fighting men on the frontlines — and eagerly anticipated by a live studio audience — is in grave jeopardy, especially bad news to Miles, the station manager, who could lose his job over the snafu. 

So it’s all hands on deck to impersonate the drawling combo, whether you’re a stuffy alcoholic announcer, a roving fish-and-chips pitchman, a mute sound-effects wiz, the stage-terrified Miles, or just plain old Archie Leach (wink wink). Fortunately, the Riley gang’s tour manager, Mabel, has arrived with scripts and costumes, so there’s a modicum of feasibility to the whole charade. 

It sinks quickly into the West. Having traveled to London on a couple of occasions and heard how American accents are painfully mangled when our playwrights are produced on the fabled West End with professional actors, I wondered what was to be expected from BBC amateurs who had never even contemplated the attempt until pushed to the brink. Were our Charlotte actors supposed to imitate laughably failed British attempts at Western cowboy drawls? I hardly dared to question director Patrick Tansor about this seeming labyrinth when I interviewed him for our holiday preview a few weeks ago. 

But Joe Klosek, who plays Archie Leach — who masquerades as Tex — spilled the beans after the opening night performance. Strange as it may seem, Tansor had his whole cast devoutly cleaving to British accents on every word they didn’t sing. Once the three musicians (who materialize serendipitously in the Jahnna Beecham-Malcolm Hillgartner book) begin playing, everyone can resume doin’ what comes natur’ly, provided it has a Western twang. 

If you sit there wondering whether you’re supposed to be part of the London audience of 1944 — or an invisible spectator who isn’t fooled for a split second — you are taking this silly romp far too seriously. Before long, the shy Mabel will be singing like a bird (Polly, to be precise), stentorian announcer Leslie will be upstaging everyone with his hambone antics, and Miles will have tossed his stagefright to the winds, playing the dummy Aces while Clive, the fish-and-chips man, pinch-hits as Jack Diamond the ventriloquist. Script? All pretense of anybody needing any damn script becomes too cumbersome to sustain. Deal with it. 

Now there’s a thin nebulous line between sheer stupidity and adorable silliness that’s hard to define. But last year’s Actor’s Theatre bomb, Every Christmas Story Ever Told, and this year’s delightful Chaps! exemplify the difference better than words. So does the disappearance of that gleaming flop sweat I saw last December on Klosek’s brow. 

I actually don’t think Klosek sang as impressively in tick, tick…BOOM! or Five Course Love, his most memorable musical outings till now. Much the same can be said of Beau Stroupe as Clive, though his comedy isn’t quite as rad as his cross-dressing in Hairspray. Ryan Stamey is reliably apoplectic as Miles — and a stitch as Aces —&a