A David Elzer, Peter Schneider and Marvelous Dreams presentation of a musical in two acts written and directed by Roger Bean.

Cindy Lou - Kirsten Chandler
Missy - Kim Huber
Betty Jean - Julie Dixon Jackson
Suzy - Bets Malone

The new production of "The Marvelous Wonderettes" at the El Portal Forum Theater is not only an expertly wrought showcase of '50s and '60s pop music, it is also brimming with a quality sometimes lacking in current shows: It's tremendously fun. Writer-director Roger Bean has created an affectionate valentine to the era, replete with charming characters and wry humor, but it's the four excellent performers who make this show shine. The cast -- all musical theater pros -- is exceptional, with lovely voices and terrific comic timing. The show is a delightfully good time.
It's the 1958 Springfield High School senior prom, and the Marvelous Wonderettes are providing the entertainment. Anxious, controlling, yet well-meaning Missy (Kim Huber) tries to keep her cohorts focused on their choreography, with limited success. Suzy (Bets Malone) is distracted by her boyfriend running the light board. She puts the gum she's constantly chewing on the mic when she sings. Cindy Lou (Kirsten Chandler) tries to steal the show, just like she tried to steal Betty Jean's (Julie Dickson Jackson) boyfriend, but the irascible B.J. isn't about to let her get away with either offense.

Jackson is bluntly hilarious as the vengeful B.J., and her tearful rendition of "It's My Party" demonstrates pretty much what that song was made for. Chandler is great as the ambitious Cindy Lou, who tries to project a particularly '50s vision of female stardom, an audio-animatronic picture of frozen cheer. She's even better in the '60s numbers, seemingly channeling Cher, her eyes wide with showbiz emotion, in "Son of a Preacher Man."

Malone is a joy as Suzy, and her Woody Woodpecker laugh is contagious. She's so convincing as the low-key, likable character that when she suddenly revs up and knocks "Respect" out of the park, belting it out with the best of them, it's both an impressive piece of singing and a satisfying turn in Suzy's story. Huber is fantastic as the somewhat repressed Missy, offering a nuanced perf of awkward moments and silent stress overcome by love. Her singing on "My Secret Love" is an astonishing revelation, and her suddenly angry version of "You Don't Own Me" amusingly shows the steel beneath her meek facade.

Janet Miller's choreography is superb, from things as sublimely silly as goofy shoulder thrusts to the ornate collection of moves illustrating the story in "Leader of the Pack." Jeremy Pivnick's lighting captures a multiplicity of moods, and Kurt Boetcher's prom set is detailed and effective.

Sets, Kurt Boetcher; costumes, Sharell Martin; lighting, Jeremy Pivnick; sound, Cricket S. Myers; choreography, Janet Miller; musical direction, Allen Everman II; production stage manager, Pat Loeb. Opened, reviewed Oct. 6, 2006; runs through Nov. 26. Running time: 2 HOURS.

THEATER REVIEW

'The Marvelous Wonderettes' at Laguna Playhouse
The musical still charms with its '50s sensibilities and songs.
By David C. Nichols, Special to The Times

July 16, 2008 As if in response to the midsummer heat, "The Marvelous Wonderettes" returns to captivate us, with an aerated glee that is virtually irresistible. In its splendid new Laguna Playhouse staging, Roger Bean's long-running hit about four singing archetypes at the 1958 senior prom has never felt more marvelous in its audience regard, or more wonderful to its nostalgic core.

The essential contours of this jukebox musical have scarcely changed since its 1999 Milwaukee Rep premiere, the smash 2003 run in Hermosa Beach and nearly two sold-out years at the El Portal Forum Theatre. It still unfolds at Springfield High on prom night, where our title canaries hectically sub as entertainment after a disciplinary debacle involving the Crooning Crabcakes.

Propelled by numerous '50s standards and a paper dream-catcher, the Wonderettes warble, clash and cavort in correlation to their individual personas and varying yens to be prom queen. That conceit, which ends Act 1 on a high, sets up Act 2, as the 10-year class reunion and deliberately pointed '60s chart-toppers serve up surprisingly affecting reversals.

What creator-director Bean and his exemplary forces do in Laguna is refine the populist concept to its zenith. Our first sight of Michael Carnahan's superb set -- a forced-perspective gymnasium complete with water fountains, crepe-papered girders and Springfield Chipmunk banners -- elicits a grin. Jeremy Pivnick lights it with candied expertise, and Cricket Myers' sound design keeps the canned accompaniment from distracting.

Most crucially, just as costumer Bobby Pearce pulls his fabulous designs for the Wonderettes' frocks from Butterick and TV Land, the triple-threat talents who wear them find authentic feeling even when joshing the iconography.

Playing bespectacled Missy, whose secret love provides the most surefire audience-participation device, the ever-amazing Misty Cotton radiates a hysterically enervated Donna Reed aspect that gives way to electrifying vocals. Darcie Roberts dons mantrap Cindy Lou's pumps with subtle assurance, her posing in the hilarious talent competition as droll as her amber-voiced intensity in Act 2 is arresting.

Their energies effortlessly meld with El Portal originators Julie Dixon Jackson and Bets Malone. Jackson imbues cut-up Betty Jean with delightful pugnacity and titanium pipes, while the priceless Malone turns gum-wielding Suzy into an ecstatic Eisenhower-era idealization, Barbara Billingsley on helium.

Seamlessly harmonizing under Brian Baker's musical direction, keenly executing choreographer Janet Miller's ingenious moves, they are sublime. So is this delicious confection. It opens off-Broadway in September -- don't miss your chance to catch a dream before the franchise goes global.

STAGE
Wonderettes' headed to off-Broadway

For its devoted fans, 'The Marvelous Wonderettes' is more than just a musical. Now the beloved '50s revue is on its way to New York.

Wonderettes
(Stefano Paltera / For The Times)

Critics Picks - Stage

By Diane Haithman, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

Pinkie-swear it's true: "The Marvelous Wonderettes" -- a modest jukebox musical about a high school girl group that has been taking audiences back to 1958 and prom night for more than 10 months at North Hollywood's El Portal Forum Theatre -- will have its first off-Broadway production in the fall.

News that "Wonderettes" is going from NoHo to New York is dreamy enough to make the show's ever-widening circle of fans -- call them the Wonderette-ettes -- just swallow their bubble gum. That group includes Kathy White, 57, of Irvine, who has seen the show "15 or 16 times" since it opened in October, often with friends in tow.

"I have seen a lot of theater, but there is something truly magical about this," White says of watching four powerhouse singers in pastel chiffon shoop-shoop their way through such golden oldies as "Mr. Sandman" and "Dream Lover" in the intimate 95-seat performance space.

"The last time I was there, I saw a guy that was probably 80 years old, grinning his head off, singing along to 'Lollipop,' " White says. "Then there was one time that this older gentleman tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'Who's the doll in the green?' "

Then there's 71-year-old Steve Jacobson of West Los Angeles, one of the owners of a large maintenance company, who has seen "Wonderettes" five times; has brought, at last count, 84 of his closest friends "and paid for most of them"; and frankly believes you should enjoy this show whether you like it or not.

"I think that this is a show everyone in America should be forced to see," Jacobson says -- from the tone of his voice, only half-joking. "I like plays that do not make me feel like the world is going to hell in a handbasket. They were good times, the Eisenhower years. It's the best show I've ever seen, and I've seen Olivier, Ustinov, Alec Guinness." This astonishing comparison makes one wonder whether Jacobson saw these celebrated actors onstage or just happened to run into them.

Patrick Keller, 42, of Anaheim, has seen the show 10 times and counting. He's also had his photo taken backstage with the "girls" -- twice -- and even showed up one night wearing a T-shirt he'd had made with an image from the show's website. "I love that era; I always say I was born in the wrong year," Keller says.

The success of "Wonderettes," first performed more than eight years ago as a one-act show at Milwaukee Repertory Theater, is music to the ears of the show's author and director, Roger Bean, as well as to producers David Elzer and Peter Schneider.

The show's producers hope that all members of the cast from the El Portal -- Kirsten Chandler, Kim Huber, Julie Dixon Jackson and Bets Malone -- will be moving east to open the show in an off-Broadway theater of about 200 seats, yet-to-be determined, sometime in the fall.

Malone, 35, who plays Suzy, says her involvement with "The Marvelous Wonderettes" dates back to that first one-act performance in Milwaukee in 1998; Malone was also on board when the expanded show came to the Hermosa Beach Playhouse in 2003, before a legal hassle with a potential commercial producer put "Wonderettes" in limbo for several years.

"I think the key to the success of this particular show is the demographic of your average theater ticket buyer -- they went to high school when these girls did," Malone says. "It's a trip down memory lane."

In a sentiment echoed by the show's fans, Malone adds that you don't have to have lived through the '50s to be nostalgic for what the decade represents. "Growing up in the 1970s, I watched '50s-era movies -- for me, it's kind of like living out a little dream of being all those girls that I saw in the movies," Malone says.

Bean has written 10 jukebox musicals commissioned and produced by the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. His shows include "Don't Touch That Dial!," "The Andrews Brothers" and "The Winter Wonderettes."

Though not yet born in 1958, Bean, 45, says he was inspired to write the story of this girl group by his mother, Lois, who was a song leader at Lynwood High School in suburban Los Angeles.

Bean has dedicated the show to his mother and borrows an old photo of Lois Bean's singing group to stand for Springfield High's Song Leaders in the program. He also borrows her maiden name for the Springfield High principal, Mr. Varney. Although Lois Bean died three years ago, some of her singing group members have come to the show at the El Portal.

"I always think it was such an innocent time, certainly in musical terms," Bean said in a recent interview in the El Portal lobby, appropriately prom-decorated with crepe paper streamers and red and pink hearts.

"Wonderettes" transports viewers "back to an easier time, before Vietnam, which was a real turning point in America," Bean continued.

He doesn't mind that the show is frequently dubbed "the female 'Forever Plaid,' " a reference to the musical revue about four young male singers killed in a car crash in the 1950s.

"At first, I was really resistant -- I didn't want people to think that in my brain I was saying, 'I'm going to sit down and write a big commercial hit,' " Bean says. "But now, by all means -- it's wonderful to be a success. There are 'Plaidheads' who go to see the show wherever it is."

In New York, the "Wonder- ettes" producers will team with Margaret Cotter, who produced "All Shook Up," the short-lived 2005 Broadway musical using the songs of Elvis Presley, and also has served as producer on the Chicago production of "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change," a four-character comedy that has been running at New York's Westside Theatre for more than a decade.

"It doesn't pretend to be any more than it sets out to be," says Cotter of "Wonderettes."

"All Shook Up" lasted only eight months on Broadway, but that doesn't deter Cotter.

" 'All Shook Up' came along after the Beach Boys and John Lennon," she says, referring to Broadway's 2005 jukebox disasters "Good Vibrations" and "Lennon." "I think critics were like, 'This is enough.' But this is on a smaller scale; it will be in an off-Broadway theater. If people can be drawn to a little theater in North Hollywood, they can be drawn to a little theater in New York."

If public demand keeps the show running in North Hollywood through the fall, a replacement cast will take over at the El Portal. Originally scheduled to close in December, "Wonderettes" has most recently been extended through Aug. 26.

Bean doesn't mind that he's found his niche with frothy jukebox fare.

"It's silly and light, but it's about love; the show is about love and memories," Bean says. "That's very emotional for a lot of people."

diane.haithman@latimes.com

http://www.calendarlive.com/stage/cl-et-wonderettes31jul31,0,7937971.story?coll=cl-stage