“Ask for the Moon,” a new musical farce at Goodspeed Musicals’ Norma Terris Theatre through Sunday, is making the theater world safe again for jokes about Nazi-styled villains, dirty old men and mangled fingers, all delivered through sweet operatic warbling. If that strikes you as an odd stylistic quest, it’s no odder than the show’s plot, in which an arts philanthropist and a nurse fend off a bunch of creepy men so they can murder a barely breathing invalid on a cruise ship. Darko Tresnjak, who wrote the book and lyrics, also directs the musical, mingling his respect for high artistic craft with a desire to laugh.
This is sheer escapism: An adventure at sea with crude humor and a lot of killing. “Ask for the Moon” feels like a parody, but it’s a parody of things that we don’t see anymore like 19th-century operetta or pre-Titanic cruise ship comedy adventures or high society melodramas. It plays like one of those “Carol Burnett Show” sketches where they’d be mocking forgotten 1930s movie styles in the 1970s.
The time period of “Ask for the Moon” is listed in the playbill as “recentish,” but the first act of it looks like “The Philadelphia Story” and the second looks like “Anything Goes.” Some fun is had with these disorienting settings. A lot of the plot comes from the scheming of evil, idle rich people so it’s appropriate that they live in their own strange little world.
When a show offers extended jokes about Anton Chekhov and Arthur Schnitzler, you might find yourself wondering what kind of audience it’s going for. The answer is “it’s for everybody” because “Ask for the Moon” also has crude hand puppets, hacked-off fingers mistaken for snack food and a tango-like dance in which the performers constantly pat their private parts. Low-brow, high-brow, baroque, gorey .
.. it’s all here.
Though it’s presented in a lush theatrical style with red curtains and footlights, the show is a farce, as silly as it can get, piling as many laughs as possible into each minute. As for how many of those jokes matter, your mileage may vary. It depends on how amused you are by kooky European accents or dead bodies piled in trunks.
A lot of mirth comes from unexpectedly vulgar words erupting from ordinary dialogue or sweet melodies. Hartford Stage subscribers from Tresnjak’s 2011-19 run as artistic director there will recognize this “fit in whatever seems funny” style from his productions of Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” With this approach, some jokes land firmly, some flop, some coast on everything else being funny and some start to annoy you because, gee, isn’t anybody ever taking anything seriously? While it aims for laugh-a-minute, “Ask for the Moon” is also very, very musical.
There’s much more singing than talking. The songs (with lyrics by Tesnjak and music by Oran Eldor) are lovely and classically rooted and gorgeously sung, even when they indulge in the same sort of jokes and wordplay as the dialogue. The tunes evoke Gilbert & Sullivan and Victor Herbert and Johann Strauss when they aren’t directly parodying Rodgers & Hammerstein.
Here’s what else “Ask for the Moon” is: a workshop, though it may not look like one. As rich and layered and jam-packed with jokes and high notes as it is, this is the show’s first production at a small venue dedicated to showcasing works-in-progress. It feels like it is still on the verge of finding itself.
This is what Goodspeed Musicals specializes in: Putting worthy new projects on their feet at the time when they will most benefit from having live audiences experience them. “Ask for the Moon” needs a lot of fine-tuning, especially in how its plot builds and how deeply it develops its characters so they matter, but it’s in the right place to test what’s going right. “Ask for the Moon” is ostensibly a murder caper, a genre Trensnjak nailed with “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” at Hartford Stage in 2012 (which went to Broadway in 2013).
A rich widow named Helene (the lithe, elastic Luba Mason) learns that she may not be getting the inheritance she has already spent, so she enlists her late husband’s nurse (Ali Ewoldt) to help her do away with the woman standing in her way. Jamison Stern, whom Connecticut audiences know from “La Cage Aux Folles” at the Goodspeed Opera House in 2015 and “Fully Committed” for TheaterWorks Hartford in 2019, plays everyone else — a conniving lawyer, twin lounge singers, a fashion stylist — though sometimes a little too similarly for comfort. He and the mostly unseen Alex Dreschke (credited as “body double” for some of the more elaborate sight gags) also manipulate a bunch of puppets.
Tresnjak seems to be consciously setting a puzzle for himself as a writer, seeing how economically he can set up a full evening of musical theater with just three main performers. The show falls short lengthwise — under two hours including intermission – yet it also seems overstuffed with inconsequential subplots and comedy setups that barely lead anywhere. It’s the kind of show where characters carefully plot a crime that involves getting somebody out of a room so they can commit it, then sit around singing and talking to the point where they never get around to doing the crime and the person they got rid of eventually just returns because where else are they going to be? It’s also the kind of show that expects the audience to care about every last little character and what happens to them.
And it’s also the kind of show that delights in having one actor play multiple characters but also indulges in other characters putting on disguises and pretending to be other people. These two elements don’t mix well and just add to the feeling that “Ask for the Moon” isn’t grounded in anything, just whatever song or joke is being done at the moment. Style over substance for sure, but then again, what style! Mason and Ewoldt have the trained voices Tresnjak and Eldor’s songs need, and they also move smoothly in the many dance or physical comedy routines.
Stern provides steady comedy support, sort of a one-man Mel Brooks movie. Comparisons with the supporting cast of “The Producers” are unmissable and in some scenes, Stern is a dead ringer for the great comic actor Kenneth Mars. You might still ask what “Ask for the Moon” wants to be, but it shoots for the moon.
Or at least stabs it in a silly way. “Ask for the Moon,” with book and lyrics by Darko Tresnjak and music by Oran Eldor, runs through Sunday at Goodspeed Musicals’ Norma Terris Theatre, 33 North Main St., Chester.
The remaining performances are Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.
m. and Sunday at 2 p.m.
$20-$54. goodspeed.org .
.
