Pixyland

By T.E. Kalem

A DAY IN HOLLYWOOD/ A NIGHT IN THE UKRAINE

Book and Lyrics by Dick Vosburgh

Music by Frank Lazarus

Directed and Choreographed by

Tommy Tune

One can almost hear Louella Parsons saying, "Hello to all of you from Haw-ley-wood." This saucy, stylish, frolicsomely funny show is an affectionate spoof of the golden age of the silver screen.

Act I is a takeoff on 1930s movie musicals. Using Grauman's Chinese Theater as aspic, it captures the cliches, the formulas, the juicily idiotic emotional punch lines of the period. Singing with slyly ironic comic abandon, Jeanette MacDonald (Peggy Hewett) fondles a life-size cardboard cutout of Nelson Eddy, never the most mobile of performers.

The show-stopper of A Day in Hollywood is a dance number called "Famous Feet." Tommy Tune, who brings an irrepressible humor to his choreography as well as dauntless invention, has devised a narrow, mirror-backed bridge span of a stage high above the stage proper. Only the legs and feet of the dancers (Niki Harris and Albert Stephenson) are visible. By their styles and their shoes, ye shall know them. Some feet! Fred and Ginger, naturally, as well as Garland, Chaplin, Dietrich and, believe it, Mickey and Minnie.

In A Night in the Ukraine, Groucho lives. So do Chico, Harpo and that lady of the formidable embonpo`int, Margaret Dumont. The program note says that this exercise in dementia is "loosely based on Chekhov's The Bear." Groucho (David Garrison) is the shysterish Samovar the Lawyer. Chico (Frank Lazarus) is a larcenous tongue-in-cheeky footman to the imperious Mrs. Pavlenko (Hewett), the Dumont role. Perfectly at ease as Harpo, Priscilla Lopez is a creature from another planet, who at one wonderfully zany moment plucks out the inevitable harp solo on the spokes of an upside-down bicycle.

Every type of cherished ploy from the classic Marx canon is here, the inane non sequiturs, the sappy puns and the bedlam chases, in this instance through the byzantine corridors of Tony Walton's red-wallpapered dollhouse of a set. Dick Vosburgh splices his own lines into the action as if he had collaborated on the films. To use a song title from the show: Hooray for Hollywood.

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