Oh, Boy!
by Bolton, Wodehouse, and Kern; City Lit Theatre, 10 July
We went to the delightful production of Oh Boy! at the City Lit theatre in North Chicago last Saturday. I enjoyed it quite a bit. Some quick thoughts:
- I like the one-set-per-act format. Oh Boy! is one of the Princess Theatre musicals, which competed with large-scale Broadway productions but had only a small theater and not much stage to work with. As the program said, they had to make sense instead.
- The cast was generally excellent, though the male chorus didn’t get much space to shine. My favorite actor of the evening was a member of the female chorus who wore yellow. She made great use of her eyes, often stealing attention from the person singing in that number. Really funny.
- Usually, in Wodehouse’s work, there’s a jaunty character who wields hilarious turns of phrase — think of Bertie Wooster — and whom we like. Jim is that character in this play, but I’m up in the air about whether to like him or not. He’s well-intentioned, but in a smarmy, Eddie Haskell way. I didn’t take the program with me and now I’m stuck without the actor names, but the man who played him was great.
- I like farces. This play is a great farce, with plenty of shenanigans and silly songs. But Oh Boy! makes use of a convention that I generally dislike in fiction — c.f. Meet the Parents — the cowardly lie. In some farces, much of the humor comes from one character’s ever-escalating lies, usually started to avoid embarrassment. To be fair, high society in the 1910s was very judgmental, and scandal was more damaging than it is today (perhaps), but still. I came out on the positive side, but there are a few times in the play where my internal critic was grumbling.
- In many ways, Oh Boy feels a lot like the Shakespearean rom-coms. Recipe for Oh Boy!: Take a pinch of A Midsummer Night’s Dream‘s lovers sporting in the woods, add a dollop of A Comedy of Errors‘ identity confusion, and a helping of Twelfth Night‘s teetotaler Malvolio. Stir vigorously. Fold in the jealousy, the earnest lovers, the cynical wits, and the bumbling cop from Much Ado About Nothing. Pour into a pre-1920s upper class environment to set. Sprinkle with the preposterous, abrupt ending from any of the above. Serve to applause.
There’s one number that’s stayed with me for its disturbing content: “A Package of Seeds.” The stagecraft to present the song is hilarious and delightful, with good dancing and singing from Jim. But the song itself is kind of monstrous. In it, the playboy Jim laments that there aren’t enough “beautiful girls” to go around, so he’d love to just have a garden to grow them in. The second verse includes a creepy image straight out of a horror film, for me: “All through the winter, they’d lie there below/ tucked underneath a mantle of snow.” I imagine a Frankenstein-like laboratory with frozen women in rows, blue with frost and frozen, like the Paris Hilton image on the poster for House of Wax. Oddly, the female chorus in the play seem to enjoy this idea.
To be fair, the second act features a female version of the song, “Rolled into One,” in which Jackie expresses a similar lament. But where Jim’s complaint is that he just can’t get enough girls — he wants his own harem, after all — Jackie’s complaint is that each man is limited in his uses. She would be happy with one man if he embodied all these things at once. But it hits on the sexism built into the play itself — the man wants lots of ladies, the woman has to make do with lots of men until she finds the one who has it all. Oddly, she settles for Jim, with whom she has practically nothing in common and who has VERY different beliefs about marriage and children than she does. I’ve included the lyrics below.
“Rolled into One”
From Oh Boy!
Though men think it strange
Girls should need a change
From their manly fascinations;
The fact is, this act is a thing we’re driven to.
You don’t have much fun
If you stick to one;
Men have all such limitations.
Look ’round you, I’m bound you
Will find that this is true.
At the opera I like to be with Freddie,
To a musical show, I go with Joe.
I like to dance with Ted, and golf with Dick or Ned,
And at the races and other lively places,
Sam and Eddie are fun.
But I’m pining ’till there comes in my direction, one combining,
Every masculine perfection,
Who’ll be Eddie,
And Joe, and Dick and Sam, and Freddie,
and Neddie and Teddie rolled in one.
Every where you go,
Men are useful, so
Just collect them when you find them.
Catch twenty, that’s plenty, I don’t think you need more.
If they say you flirt,
Don’t be feeling hurt,
That’s a way they have; don’t mind them.
They tell us they’re jealous,
But that’s what men are for.
“A Package of Seeds”
From Oh Boy!
Beautiful girls are so scarce, I have found;
There never seems half enough to go ’round.
I’ve often wished that in gardens they grew,
Warmed by the sunshine and wet by the dew.
If I’d a garden where girlies would grow,
You’d find me there with my spade and my hoe.
My little garden, I never would leave,
I’d work from daybreak until the eve.
Daytime and night, I would cheerfully toil.
I’d kill the blight and the blight and encourage the soil.
And when at last, I had cleared it of weeds,
I’d go and buy me a package of seeds.
All through the winter, they’d lie there below,
Tucked snugly under a mantle of snow.
April, at last, warmth and showers, would bring,
And all my flowers would bloom in the Spring.
Primrose and Myrtle and Lilys I’d see.
They’d be there growing for no one but me.
Delightful creatures: a garden of girls
With fairest features and lovely curls.
All ’round my garden, in rapture, I’d roam.
I’d stay all day there all day there and never go home.
I can’t imagine what more a man needs
Than lots of ground and a package of seeds.
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