In a narrow, upstairs rehearsal room at the Boston Center for the Arts, the cast of the musical "Adrift in Macao," which starts performances this week at the Lyric Stage Company, bump into each other and miss a few steps as they try to remember the combination they learned just before a lunch break. The song is called "The Chase" and it happens at the point in this comedy when all of the disparate pieces of the show come crashing together. In the course of the number, as the performers spin and leap in an ever-tightening circle, identities are revealed, shots are fired from make-believe guns, and characters confess their motives.
A loving spoof of film noir and Hollywood romances, "Adrift in Macao" is filtered through lyricist and book writer Christopher Durang's wry sense of humor. The story, such as it is, follows the melodramatic adventures of the chanteuse Lureena Jones (Aimee Doherty) as she looks for a gig, or maybe something more mysterious, in the Far East.
Director and choreographer Stephen Terrell interrupts his cast. "OK, let's clean this up a little. You're getting jammed together."
In less than 30 minutes, with suggestions from Terrell and some vocal tweaks from musical director Jonathan Goldberg, the seven cast members transform a jumble into a sharply choreographed production number. In addition to Doherty, who was a hit as the understudy-who-went-on in "The Wild Party" earlier this year, Terrell's cast includes Paul Farwell, who is coming straight from playing Scrooge in "A Christmas Carol," and the scene-stealing Kathy St. George, last seen in her own one-woman show about Judy Garland.
During a break, Terrell talks about the challenges of creating big choreography on what he calls "a postage-stamp stage."
Originally, the director was concerned about the cramped playing space. "But I realized, what makes this show so much fun is that it's not 'West Side Story' or 'Guys and Dolls.' It's playing with the idea of being oversized and ridiculous," he says. "They're supposed to be all jammed together, because that's what the show is doing, cramming all sorts of clichés and plot lines into one small musical."
For playwright Durang, "Adrift in Macao" represents a return to his beginnings as a musical theater writer. Although he's best known for his absurdist comedies - including "Miss Witherspoon," which was a hit at the Lyric last season, "The Marriage of Bette and Boo," and "Betty's Summer Vacation" - "Adrift in Macao" is the first musical he's written since "The Idiots Karamazov," and his career-launching "A History of the American Film," which earned a Tony nomination in 1978.
"It's turned out that I've mostly written straight plays," he says by phone from New York, "but I always thought I'd write musicals, since that's what I started writing in high school, and they became part of my college application."
Durang graduated from Harvard and went on to Yale School of Drama. "When I got a call out of the blue from [composer] Peter Melnick," he says, "it seemed like perfect timing to return to the form."
Melnick, a grandson of Richard Rodgers, had spent much of his early career focused on film scoring before turning to musical theater several years ago. Initially, Melnick was hoping Durang might collaborate on a short musical that could be paired with another short musical Melnick had already written.
"When I listened to his music," says Durang, "I was struck by one song in particular called 'Time,' from the movie 'The Only Thrill,' that conjured up a romantic nightclub and was very jazzy. I realized many of the old movies that I like from the '30s and '40s have women getting jobs as singers in nightclubs, which is almost impossible in real life. I had this impulse to place the lead character in a foreign country, having lost everything but the evening gown she's wearing, and land a job as a singer in about five minutes."
Before long, Durang and Melnick realized "Adrift in Macao" had more to say than the original 30-minute format, and they continued to flesh it out into a full-length musical.
"Although it has a film noir look," Durang says, "it doesn't have that much interest in the violence and darkness. It's really silly and playful and about wised-up women and hard-to-read men."
The strength of "Adrift in Macao" is not in its story line, agrees Terrell, the head of the musical theater department at Emerson College, whose last outing at the Lyric was Michael John LaChiusa's musical "See What I Wanna See," in which three separate accounts of a violent incident are retold.
"Of course we try to connect the dots, but this show is really about style, and playing to Durang's jokes," Terrell says. "We don't worry too much about the plot. We're too busy having fun."
