Revue Is a Playful Bit of ‘Tomfoolery’

GARDEN GROVE —  There he was, yapping his tomfool head off about war, pollution, prejudice, dope peddling and more.

Tom Lehrer, a Harvard-educated mathematician, stumbled into the music business when he found that people would pay good money for recordings of the satiric songs he’d been writing for fun.

Turning out tunes mostly in the ‘50s (when America was scared to death of Communists and the atom bomb) and ‘60s (when the nation was making love and war), he lampooned everyone left, right and center--couching barbed witticisms in deceptively sunny, old-fashioned melodies.

The world has changed a lot since then. Yet as we listen to Lehrer’s songs again in “Tomfoolery”--a 1980 revue that has resurfaced in a playful if not always polished presentation at the Garden Grove Playhouse--we realize that things haven’t changed as much as we’d like to think.

“National Brotherhood Week,” for instance, rips off America’s mask of smiling acceptance to reveal the prejudice underneath in such lines as: “It’s fun to eulogize / the people you despise. / As long as you don’t let ‘em in your school.”

The addictive strains of “The Old Dope Pedder” whisper: “He gives the kids free samples, / because he knows full well / That today’s young innocent faces / will be tomorrow’s clientele.”

Director Bradley Miller stages 28 of Lehrer’s songs as a demented mix of vaudeville and cheesy nightclub act. Accompanist / musical director Bill Wolfe sits at a piano bar (complete with tip jar) while the seven performers breeze through Mylar streamer curtains to make their entrances.

Bil Barratt, Richard Comeau, Holly Jeanne, Art Kocsis, Marie Madera, Edward J. Steneck and Monica Suter perform the numbers with a nudge and a wink. Looking like coffeehouse rejects, they cradle flimsy cardboard guitars in “The Folk Song Army.” They gleefully cut a rug to “The Vatican Rag.” And they get a little too much of a thrill out of performing “The Masochism Tango.”

The opening night audience laughed itself silly, even when these community players struggled to hit a note or flubbed the choreography. The performers captured Lehrer’s spirit, and that’s all that mattered.

A couple of them truly excel. Comeau gamely rattles off the periodic table--first at regular tempo, then double-time--in Lehrer’s immortal “The Elements,” set to the tune of Sir Arthur Sullivan’s “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General.” And Jeanne always gets a laugh, whether she’s an oh, so refined Hah-vaaahd cheerleader in “Fight Fiercely Harvard” or a jolly murderer in “The Irish Ballad.”

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Lehrer is the show’s true star, however--as he should be. Always wacky and often wicked, he’s at his best when he manages to blast all sides of an issue in one song. “Smut” is a comedy classic because it pokes fun of people who get their jollies from porn even as it blasts the censors. “Give me smut and nothing but! / A dirty novel I can’t shut. . . . Pornographic pictures I adore, / Indecent magazines galore, / I like them more if they’re hard-core.”

Though several songs are out their era (“New Math,” for instance), and a couple more have become decidedly un-p.c. (particularly “In Old Mexico”), still more are timeless. And as hostile factions unleash terrorism and destruction on one another, a couple of songs--particularly “We Will All Go Together When We Go”--gain an eerie relevance. So everybody sing: “When the air becomes uranious, / We will all go simultaneous. / Yes, we all will go together when we go.”

BE THERE

“Tomfoolery” runs 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday; and 8 p.m. Dec. 5-6 and 12-13 at Garden Grove Community Theatre, in Eastgate Park, Chapman Avenue and St. Mark Street, Garden Grove. (714) 897-5122. $12. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.