Skylight’s Day in Hollywood/Night in the Ukraine

Movie clichès are the subject of A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine, which the Skylight Opera Theatre opened Friday night. The Hollywood part is a lighthearted musical dissertation on the subject. The Ukraine part is like a Marx Brothers movie distilled to its clichèd essence.

A cast of nine appears first as uniformed ushers at the Hollywood landmark Grauman’s Chinese Theatre during Hollywood’s Golden Age. They sing, tap and soft-shoe through assorted Hollywood trivia. In a string of episodes, we discover, for example, how the Hollywood Walk of Fame came to be. We learn, in a medley, how many big movie songs Richard Whiting composed.

The stage is on two levels, with the upper perhaps eight feet above the main. Director Pam Kriger put the setup to good use in Famous Feet. In this extended number, Ben George and Molly Rhode hoofed and sang about movie stars, dancers mostly, we might recognize from the knees down.

Above, the rest of the cast came through costumed and dancing in the style of everyone from Fred Astaire to Marlene Dietrich to Minnie and Mickey Mouse. A half-lowered curtain concealed all but the lower third. Kriger cleverly played unison, mirror and contrary motion with the lower and upper dancers and sometimes had them tap in call-and-response.

Not all the numbers worked so well. For example, not all of Whiting’s songs have aged gracefully. This is no reflection on singer Jennifer C. Kiel, but I could live a full life without hearing Good Ship Lollipop again. This is a strong cast, but by the end of Hollywood, I got that sense of a cast trying a little too hard. That can happen when performers lack faith in their material. This is a smile-big, play-to-the-gallery show, and artificial by nature. But even that sort of show can be oversold, and that happened intermittently Friday.

All of that went away in the second half, when everyone got to play a stock role to the hilt.

The players drove their points home and then twisted the blades with luxuriant abandon and precise comic timing. Norman Moses led the way as Groucho playing a scheming lawyer in a Russian farce. Moses has long been the Skylight’s go-to Groucho, and he completely gets both the frantic, in-the-action Groucho and the cynical, deadpan fellow who steps out of the action to make snark with the audience. Kriger might have helped him to his best Groucho dancing ever.

Moses had the perfect foil in Benjamin Howes’ Chico. Howes gets the guy’s cheerful, blunt stupidity and was hilarious throughout. Ray Jivoff, the Skylight’s go-to Harpo, threw himself into the role as he always does. The three of them were so perfect that you’d think they do this all the time.

Melinda Pfundstein and Chase Stoeger made the obligatory ingenues more starry-eyed and empty headed than the ones in the movies, and a whole lot funnier. Carol Greif Schuele, as Mrs. Pavlenko, stood in for Margaret Dumont and made great comedy of the classic combination of high dudgeon and utter bewilderment.

A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine runs through April 4 at the Broadway Theatre Center. For tickets and further information call the BTC box office, 414-291-7800 or visit the Skylight Opera Theatre website.