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Nov. 4th, 2007 11:15 amYesterday we got up early and hit the road to St. Louis to catch The Drowsy Chaperone at the Fox (Memphis has an old movie house, the Orpheum, which has likewise been converted for touring companies, but it's slate is weak at best, and I won't subscribe to a season that has High School Musical on the bill). We left at a quarter to seven, and hit the parking garage at a quarter to noon, with a stop for breakfast, and to pick up a friend of ours in West Memphis who was meeting her husband (who's working in Kansas City) there.
I'm always impressed with old movie houses, but the Fox in St. Louis is a real gem. Art Deco coupled with what I'll call "High Orientalism"--thirty five foot high Rajahs, coupled with griffin statues and friezes, and bas-relief sculptures of Vishnu, and a whole menagerie of animals adorn the place. Built at a cost of $700,000 back when a movie ticket was around $0.50, it's a monument to the faith that roaring twenties America had in the emerging medium of the motion picture, as are all old movie houses (The Fox in Atlanta and the Saenger in New Orleans are two other restored showpieces, but one can see promise even in the purely Art-Deco Saenger in Mobile. Compared to my memory of the others, the St. Louis Fox is a more spectacular location, but St. Louis was probably a more cosmopolitan city in the 1920s than other, more Southerly towns, which were late to the party of postwar extravagance).
The show, as a touring company, was probably as good as you're likely to see on Broadway at the moment (this is the exception rather than the rule), with Georgia Engel reprising her role as Mrs. Tottendale, Man in Chair and Janet coming from the Broadway replacement production, and Nancy Opel (late of Urinetown) stepping in as the Chaperone.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel has at least 578 reasons to love the show, some of which disappear with a touring company, but I'm sure most of them still hold up. By this time I'm not adding anything to the discussion to talk about the show itself, except to say that it's great.
Occasionally a touring show will send cast members to the lobby afterward to collect for Equity Fights AIDS, which meant that on the way out we got to say hi to Georgia Engel, tell her that the show was wonderful, and put a couple of bills in her coffee can. It was a little disheartening to see that the show was not fully-attended, and the actor playing Robert Martin (the groom) was standing at the exit telling folks to tell their friends to come see the show, when you know Mamma Mia! will sell out next June. Of course, thanks to the sparse attendance, we got to move a little closer to the center from our fifth row WAY RIGHT seats, which caused us to miss just a little bit of the onstage action.
Afterwards, we went to Trader Joe's to get cocoa-covered almonds, pumpkin butter, and cheap wine, and Fitz's for all the root beer we could drink. Then the long, long drive back to Memphis with only a minimum of fighting off road hypnosis.
I'm always impressed with old movie houses, but the Fox in St. Louis is a real gem. Art Deco coupled with what I'll call "High Orientalism"--thirty five foot high Rajahs, coupled with griffin statues and friezes, and bas-relief sculptures of Vishnu, and a whole menagerie of animals adorn the place. Built at a cost of $700,000 back when a movie ticket was around $0.50, it's a monument to the faith that roaring twenties America had in the emerging medium of the motion picture, as are all old movie houses (The Fox in Atlanta and the Saenger in New Orleans are two other restored showpieces, but one can see promise even in the purely Art-Deco Saenger in Mobile. Compared to my memory of the others, the St. Louis Fox is a more spectacular location, but St. Louis was probably a more cosmopolitan city in the 1920s than other, more Southerly towns, which were late to the party of postwar extravagance).
The show, as a touring company, was probably as good as you're likely to see on Broadway at the moment (this is the exception rather than the rule), with Georgia Engel reprising her role as Mrs. Tottendale, Man in Chair and Janet coming from the Broadway replacement production, and Nancy Opel (late of Urinetown) stepping in as the Chaperone.
derspatchel has at least 578 reasons to love the show, some of which disappear with a touring company, but I'm sure most of them still hold up. By this time I'm not adding anything to the discussion to talk about the show itself, except to say that it's great.Occasionally a touring show will send cast members to the lobby afterward to collect for Equity Fights AIDS, which meant that on the way out we got to say hi to Georgia Engel, tell her that the show was wonderful, and put a couple of bills in her coffee can. It was a little disheartening to see that the show was not fully-attended, and the actor playing Robert Martin (the groom) was standing at the exit telling folks to tell their friends to come see the show, when you know Mamma Mia! will sell out next June. Of course, thanks to the sparse attendance, we got to move a little closer to the center from our fifth row WAY RIGHT seats, which caused us to miss just a little bit of the onstage action.
Afterwards, we went to Trader Joe's to get cocoa-covered almonds, pumpkin butter, and cheap wine, and Fitz's for all the root beer we could drink. Then the long, long drive back to Memphis with only a minimum of fighting off road hypnosis.
