Hooray For Hollywood!
Hooray For Hollywood!
With Heather Alexander, Krista Leona Anderson, and Jeff Clark
Musical direction by Kyle Mattingly
Winter Park Playhouse, Winter Park FL</strong>
If you’re a guy, sit on the aisle. Eventually Heather Alexander will sit in your lap and mess with your comb-over. While we waited for her trade mark “Slutty Number,” the WPPH singers ran through some of the great song from the American Film Institute Top 100 movies of the 20th century. That’s a huge fount of raw material and cutting the list down to a 2 hour program was the toughest part of their job. They chose some easy ones like “Moon River” from Breakfast at Tiffany’s and “As Time Goes By” from Casablanca, and some relative obscurities like “When She Loved Me” from Toy Story 2 and “Make ‘Em Laugh” from Singing In The Rain. There was even a piano number from Forrest Gump, and with no vocals, the cast had time to throw feathers on Mr. Mattingly as he played.
The first act had the trio out there in matching blue tops and pants, and they got Jeff Clark in a dress briefly for “Que Sera” and “Buttons and Bows”. A little camp is OK, but we were quickly back to the serious singing, including a rarely heard full version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” by Ms. Alexander. There’s an introduction for the song that was cut for the film, and the abbreviated version itself was nearly cut as well. Judy Garland only sang it once on the Luella Parson’s radio show.
The second act found the singers a bit more eclectically dressed, and opened with the WPPH mantra “The bar is open, and the more you drink the better we sound.” Someone took them seriously, there was a bit of good natured heckling and a manual response from the stage. A long set of Burt Bacharach followed, including an Oscar wining number from an X rated movie – Midnight Cowboy’s “Everybody’s Talking at Me”. There WAS a narrow slice of time between the end of the Hayes code and the refusal of papers to advertise X films where that rating meant edgy cinema and not just enormous genitals. The show was packed with fun facts like this, and that helps make this more than just a bunch of singing heads. WPPH is looking for larger quarters, and it’s about time. They sell out regularly, and you need to buy early to get in on their brand of fluffy fun.
For more information on Winter Park Playhouse, please visit http://www.winterparkplayhouse.org
