Northern Light Theatre Company. Shedley Theatre. 14 March 2015
Happy Days, the musical, spawned from the fourth season of the American sitcom TV series in 1976. Happy Days ran from 1974 to 1984 and was one of the most popular shows of the '70s. How popular? The leather jacket worn by Henry Winkler as The Fonz is in the Smithsonian Institute. Both the musical and the series are Californian creations that satisfied the market for nostalgia by post-war babies who thought wistfully of high school and grew up on James Dean movies and Elvis Presley music - in fact, they make an inspirational appearance in the show. Just out of interest, Grease the musical opened in 1971, with the film Grease following Happy Days the musical in 1978, so these stories in various media leapfrogged each other. Henry Winkler turned down the similarly leather-clad Italian-American role of Danny Zucco for fear of being typecast, but of course, he already was.
The Northern Light Theatre Company’s reprise is directed by a father and son team (George and Gary Humphries respectively) and a musical direction/choreography team of three sisters (Danielle, Tammy and Kylie Pedler respectively). It doesn't go very well.
The horns in the overture made the orchestra suspect from the start. Nearly all the cueing in the dialogue and some of the scene changes were slower than a math class. At times, some individual microphones didn't work. The choreography was unchallenging, and even then, sometimes arms were going up when they should be going down. Arnold's looked like a shed (set design: John Sheehan).
The situation of the situation comedy, and the narrative, is way past its use-by date. The school kids are all white, reflecting pre-desegregation times. The milieu is nauseatingly American dream and apple pie, with Mrs C straining to escape the gravity pull of the stove. Male Mexican-Americans are portrayed as villains and female ones as sex objects. And the all-star wrestling competition at a picnic? Even one of the characters thought that was weird.
Gus Smith was miscast as The Fonz. Limping around on stage and unwilling to dance, his obvious older age to the Class of '59 made him look like a spent force; it was difficult to see why he was revered in this corner of Milwaukee, or why anyone thought his Fonz was cool, except his Fonz-self. Fonz is supposed to be a drop-out of the current crop of kids, not a hanger-on from the Class of '49, unless he flunked Grade 12 ten times. Nathan Quadrio looked very comfortable on stage and presented the requisite affable and handsome Richie. Bianca Levai was in fine voice as Pinky and gave the impression of subduing her soul capacities to the plain white bread music. Cheryl Ford as the aforementioned mother was the real McCoy evoking sympathy. Delanie Whibley was a standout and could have a career in musical theatre after her upcoming stint to study dance in LA.
Happy Days is a great opportunity to get lots of young people up on stage singing and dancing, but after four weeks of the Fringe, this was a hard landing back into the Adelaide scene.
David Grybowski
When: 13 to 28 Mar
Where: Shedley Theatre
Bookings: seatadvisor.com
