The Drury Lane in Oakbrook Terrace is a lovely place for a spring wedding. But unless you currently are embroiled in the planning or, shudder, the paying for one, its latest theatrical production will, I fear, be less than engrossing.
The retro show in question is “Father of the Bride,” as written in 1951 by the late Caroline Francke. That will be a familiar title to many readers, not so much because of the 1949 novel by Edward Streeter but due to its multiple cinematic incarnations. In 1950, this story of how costly wedding plans disrupt an upper-middle-class family was filmed by Vincente Minnelli with Spencer Tracy and Elizabeth Taylor. A 1991 version starred Steve Martin and Diane Keaton. All in all, Streeter’s novel has spawned no less than six movies in this loose franchise, each adapting the original story in fresh ways.
Freshness is not what first comes to mind here.
As staged here by director Michael Heitzman, Francke’s play makes you feel like someone took a time capsule and transported the entire Drury Lane back to the mid-1950s.
That would have a certain appeal for some, and for good reason, but that decade produced far more worthy comedies. The problem with this clunker of a script is that it bangs away at its central theme — should Kay (Aurora Penepacker) have a large wedding at the expense of the titular dad, Stanley (Joe Dempsey) or should she quietly elope with her flaky beau Buckley (Jake DiMaggio Lopez) — so repetitively, you feel like you stuck not just in a time warp but a vortex from which no scene can escape.
This thing is like “Groundhog Day,” wedding edition.
Yes, it is stressful to decide on the size of a reception. But those are first-world problems, so to speak, and this affair debates the size of the guest list for what feels like hours as various characters (Rachel Sullivan plays the mother Ellie; Kyle Ringley and Charlie Long are Kay’s two kid brothers and Maya Hlava a girlfriend of one of them) bicker over who should be “church only” and who should get to come to the reception. Nobody not on the stage can give a darn.
Elope already, one screams inside one’s head before we even get to intermission.
The problems here lie mostly with the script, but this also is a production that somehow cannot find the stakes in the story, which is why the show is so repetitive. It also struggles to find the heart here, which I found a tad perplexing, given the quality of actors like Dempsey, Penepacker and Sullivan, and the prior work of a director who staged one of the best productions of “42nd Street” I’ve ever seen.
It feels like Heitzman and his well-spoken actors got caught between realism, parody and affectionate screwball comedy and ended up with so much physical business in their too chilly and way-too-slow show that the thin layers of conflict in the script are stretched beyond what they can sustain. The single-set play (there is an elegant living room from designer Lauren Nichols) has any number of phone calls and each time that darn phone rang, one character or another would traipse back to answer it, sucking up time and slowing whatever comic energy had previously been attained. And it’s not like whatever was about to be revealed on the other end of that line could not be anticipated.
There are some modest laughs, mostly at the arrival of duplicate wedding gifts and Dempsey’s Stanley suffering at the hands of the ever-inflated budget. The 1950s costumes from Emily Rebholz are lovely and, as a record of 1950s social mores, I guess you could say that this script has some modest interest.
But it’s no affair to remember. Strictly for wedding planners, this one.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
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Review: “Father of the Bride” (2 stars)
When: Through May 31
Where: Drury Lane Theatre, 100 Drury Lane, Oakbrook Terrace
Running time: 2 hours 20 mins.
Tickets: $65-$125 at 630-530-0111 and drurylanetheatre.com