Dames at Sea

Deconstruct a Sam Peckinpah western for the stage and you get a tight piece of absurdism like Sam Shepard's Fool for Love. Deconstruct a Busby Berkeley movie musical and you have the loose two hours of light-heartedness that is Dames at Sea. In this spoof of old Broadway, which mostly parodies the Berkeley film, 42nd Street, a dedicated cast of six top notch hoofers fight the good fight; tapping, belting and mugging their way through a book that ranges from predictable to corny to borderline misogynistic. Tomatoes, here, are not the kind that grow on vines, but there's a lot of squeezing going on nonetheless.

Having been produced off-Broadway in 1968, and in community theaters and high school gymnasiums across the country ever since, this one hit wonder from the once only team of Haimsohn, Miller and Wise is now on Broadway at last. It arrives as an example of how dated material can still entertain when blessed with a cast and crew of talented professionals.

Things happen fast in Dames, and that, indeed, is the joke at the show's heart. Can Ruby (Eloise Kropp), the girl from just off the bus, be cast in a Broadway chorus in a matter of minutes? But of course. Is there love at first sight in store? You betcha. Hey sailor, do you happen to have a battle ship where we can put on a show tonight because our theater is scheduled for demolition? All aboard.

In those old flicks of the 1930's where the lovable understudy suddenly takes over for the injured leading lady, we rarely get to fully appreciate how talented that replaced star is to begin with. Not so here, with our diva, Mona Kent, played on full tilt by Lesli Margherita. A true triple threat, Margherita shows off a soaring voice that fills the intimate Helen Hayes Theatre, surprisingly nimble tap moves, and a well-tuned sense of zaniness, drawing laughs from Miller & Haimsohn's thin dialog. She's a hard villainess to hate. As Ruby, Kropp is nothing at all like Margherita, physically or vocally, but that won't stop her from going out there a nobody and coming back a star. Any thoughts of her being miscast are swept away after witnessing her dynamite tap routine late in the second act. Ruby is befriended by know-it-all chorus gal Joan (Mara Davi) and the two are endlessly being wooed, groped or sung to by the handsome sailor boys Dick and Lucky (Cary Tedder and Danny Gardner). These two gents are fairly interchangeable, but Gardner at least gets to avoid the incessant Dick jokes that director/choreographer Randy Skinner apparently felt obliged to stress whenever possible. Skinner makes up for this sin by providing several marvellously entertaining dance routines including a sequence in the duet of "Choo-Choo Honeymoon" that finds Davi tapping while seated and Gardner clicking his heels against the side of an upright piano. Rounding out the cast is John Bolton, doubling up as both Hennesey, the harried stage director, and the ship's lascivious Captain. Bolton has a demanding presence, but his best work comes off stage in some impossibly fast costume changes. Wise's score is most often a syncopated soundtrack for rapid fire tap-tapping, but there are a few welcome breaks in the pace; notably, Ruby's sweet ballad "Raining in My Heart," and Mona's "The Beguine," which fires back at "Choo-Choo Honeymoon" with a racy bit of Cha-Cha-Cha.

"What's that old expression? Oh, yes, nostalgia ain't what it used to be. That phrase floated through my head more than once during the Broadway revival of 'Dames at Sea.'"
Charles Isherwood for New York Times

"'Dames at Sea' is a mid-1960s musical trifle that works overtime to be cheeky good fun. Thanks to a cast with twinkle-toes and polished pipes, it succeeds — for a while. Before long, though, monotony sets in and won't go away. Even top-notch tap-dancing can get repetitive."
Joe Dziemianowicz for New York Daily News

"Dames at Sea's mild pastiche (of plots like 42nd Street's and songs by the likes of Gershwin and Porter) is passable but passé—imagine a revival, half a century from now, of a Fringe show about the '80s—and it's presented with tongue so far in cheek that it can't say much at all."
Adam Feldman for Time Out New York

"This insubstantial musical, which sits awkwardly between celebration and parody, opened Thursday at the Helen Hays Theatre like a riff off a long-forgotten joke. And its bad identity crisis lets down one of the most hard-working casts in the business."
Mark Kennedy for Associated Press

"Broadway has often been down this road lately, but it's nonetheless a sweet tap-your-troubles-away nostalgia trip."
David Rooney for The Hollywood Reporter

"The new leading lady of 'Dames at Sea' is no Bernadette Peters. There's nothing wrong with this revival that Peters, who played the role of Ruby in the original 1968 production, couldn't fix. But musical theater stars of her caliber don't grow on trees, and although newcomer Eloise Kropp is a power tapper par excellence, she hasn't the saucy charm of a Broadway Baby like Ruby — or the magnetic appeal of a star like Peters."
Marilyn Stasio for Variety

External links to full reviews from popular press...

New York Times - New York Daily News - Time Out - Hollywood Reporter - Variety