There is something unabashedly Shakespearean about “Love in Bloom.” From the Faerie King and Queen who must meddle in human affairs to save themselves to the headstrong damsels who must disguise themselves as men to achieve their goals, traces of ““ and even blatant shout-outs to ““ the Bard are rife in this play.
“Love in Bloom,” a new musical comedy, makes its debut run at the Santa Monica Playhouse until Dec. 13. Chris DeCarlo and Evelyn Rudie wrote the play, which fuses the traditional theatrical tropes of Shakespeare with tunes similar to Sondheim’s. DeCarlo and Rudie, real-life husband and wife, also star in their play as the Faerie King and Queen.
Because of a magical mishap caused 10 years prior to the play’s events by the overzealous, but often imprudent Faerie King, the kingdom of Hamelot’s fate rests in the balance. The play takes place in one day’s time, during which the faerie couple must reunite long-lost sisters, guide three pairs of star-crossed lovers into holy matrimony and resolve their own marital qualms ““ all to restore order to the kingdom.
The story is well-written and seems very familiar to any theater savant. Indeed, the story’s nymphal frame is right out of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Essentially, “Love in Bloom” feels as if it had been created in imitation of Shakespeare’s manuscripts, but stripped of some of its sophistication and fitted to MIDI music.
The cast is small. The set is small. But the play uses its resources well and leaves a large impression. Except for a brief moment at the very end of the play, all eight cast members are always onstage. Well-planned and well-executed lighting permits the cast to enter and exit the action but never the stage. The set includes a lower level, which shows the goings-on in Hamelot. A dais, which wraps around the flanks and back of this lower level, is home to the Faerie King and Queen as they look down on the real world. These levels focus our sights on the action within Hamelot and also entitle us as an audience to the same all-seeing eye that the faeries have.
Wig-stands holding hats and hairpieces of all varieties adorn the stage. At first, the headwear-littered set is confusing, but as the play progresses, its purpose becomes clearer.
Except for the faeries, each cast member dons a drab, loose-fitting outfit with a tight wrapping around his or her head. As chorus members, the actors masterfully play in pantomime and mimic objects such as an arbor, a fountain or even fire. With the simple addition of a wig, however, the actor becomes a character ““ an adventurous damsel, a wishy-washy prince or a sex-crazed wet nurse. The mechanical simplicity and symbolic complexity of the wigs make them one of the play’s most prominent and inventive features.
The cast sings well and the songs are funny, heartfelt and lexically amusing. “She Likes You” is perhaps the play’s most clever song, if only because it humorously and honestly explains how easy yet confoundingly hard it is to know when a girl is actually into a guy. The closing numbers of both acts, “A Modest Proposal” and “A Rose By Any Name” hit home the love-conquers-all theme that runs through the production.
The play’s only major turnoffs are the annoying MIDI accompaniment ““ we can only take so many beeps and robotic flute sounds in a two-hour period ““ and the excess of ribaldry. True, Shakespeare used bawdy language to elicit easy laughs from his audiences, but that is because he used a foul mouth masterfully. Almost every crude comment in “Love in Bloom” was a phallic reference, and I can only withstand a modicum of the Faerie King’s flippant statements about his “wand,” followed by his hand pointing to his crotch, which, packed tightly into his black leggings, looked more like a male cameltoe.
“Love in Bloom,” as an original work, is good. As homage to Shakespeare, master of pantomime Marcel Marceau, Commedia dell’arte and conventions of classical theater in general, it soars. And by the time the lights fade to black, you will not be able to fight the feeling that all you need is love.
““ E-mail Boden at dboden@media.ucla.edu.