Satire should sting a little bit. At its best — razor-edged, likely to confuse and offend a portion of its audience — satire cuts to the heart of dusty, unchallenged societal hypocrisy.
There was no American era quite as perfect as the 1950s and early ’60s for a satirist such as Tom Lehrer to come along. If you believed the propaganda, America was a nation of Don and Betty Drapers (“Mad Men”), uniformly flush with confidence, living the high life amid a booming post-war economy, smugly certain of the godly righteousness of their leaders and their nation. It took people like Lehrer, the Beat Generation and the nascent folk movement to point out the emperor’s decidedly minimalist wardrobe choice.
While Bob Dylan was solemn and frustrated, and the Beats were joyous and wild, Lehrer’s weapon of choice was musical satire. He wielded his songs like a scalpel, slicing with precision at treasured myths of American life, a collection of which makes up the revue “Tomfoolery,” now showing at the Denver Victorian Playhouse.
Though this is veteran director Wade P. Wood’s first time at the helm of a musical revue, he keeps the ship largely on course as his cast of four rips through 25 of Lehrer’s classic songs in under two hours. There are plenty of groan-worthy puns and rather obvious jokes but also lots of humor requiring some degree of thought — Lehrer’s other career as a Harvard-educated mathematician is a dead giveaway that intelligence and a sense of humor often go hand in hand.
The show begins with “Be Prepared,” featuring the entire cast, led by Clark Bomer Brittain as a sort of demented Boy Scout leader. All are wearing Scout-style neckerchiefs and marching down the aisles to the stage. That’s followed by one of Lehrer’s best-known songs, “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” which sounds like a sweet and ordinary ’50s-style love song until you realize the murderous nature of the singers.
Soon we move to Lehrer’s time at Harvard, with songs such as “Bright College Days” and “Fight Fiercely Harvard,” which hilariously features Amanda Goldrick as an enthusiastic, if not entirely coordinated, cheerleader. And in a most amazingly tongue-tripping demonstration of clear diction and memorization, Henrik Boes sings “The Element Song,” a listing of the periodic table set to the tune of “Major-General’s Song” from “The Pirates of Penzance.”
With songs this old — especially satiric songs — there are bound to be a few clunkers. Indeed, when the show first came out in 1981, reviewers noted the risk of boring the audience, given the dated nature of the pieces even then. But there is still fun to be found in them.
Paula Jayne Friedland stoically stands up to the chore of singing “In Old Mexico,” an almost-too-dated song that gets a lot of mileage out of the apparent hilarity that people from different countries speak differently than we do — for instance, the pronunciation of “j” as “jay” in “Guadalajara.” But even this song features buried gems of Lehrer-esque wordplay: The song as a whole may not be that funny, but rhyming “toros” with “morose” is hilarious.
The few misses are merely a side-effect of the passage of time, not the fault of the cast. Soon the show is back on track, with “When You’re Old and Grey,” the most honest love song ever, chronicling in detail a couple’s likely decline: “I’ll lose my virility and you your fertility and desirability . . .”
“Vatican Rag” alone is worth the price of admission, between Missy Moore’s choreography and the cast dressed as nuns singing lines such as “Genuflect! Genuflect! 2-4-6-8! Time to transubstantiate!”
“Tomfoolery” is a revue, and as such it suffers from the thinness typical of the genre. But surprisingly perhaps, most of the material holds up fairly well; maybe enough time has passed that the songs have moved past dated and into the category of nostalgia. The cast and director have treated Lehrer’s work with love and enthusiasm, bringing to life the work of a beloved American humor icon in a show that will amuse old fans and new.
“Tomfoolery” ***1/2 (out of four stars)
The music and lyrics of Tom Lehrer. Presented by the Denver Victorian Playhouse, 4201 Hooker St. Directed by Wade P. Wood. Starring Henrik Boes, Clark Bomer Brittain, Amanda Goldrick and Paula Jayne Friedland. Through Sept. 11. $18. 303-433-4343 or
