The name of a new theater company, Bay Area Musicals, officially gains an exclamation point when abbreviated: BAM! That shout of punctuation is certainly deserved for the ambitious vision of the company's founder and artistic director, 25-year-old Matthew McCoy, whose passion for the American musical spans the decades in the debut BAM! season. Coming up are productions of Hair and La Cage aux Folles at the Victoria Theatre, but Marines' Memorial Theatre is the site of the BAM! debut. It's How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and if the company hasn't quite earned an exclamation point for the production itself, there is some exclaiming to do for having got the musical up and running in reasonable fashion.
How to Succeed, a Broadway hit in 1961, may seem like an overly familiar chestnut to catch the attention of theatrically savvy audiences, but while it has been twice revived on Broadway in the past 20 years, I have not caught a local production of it in that same amount of time. Yet it all seems comfortably familiar, and McCoy's production seems content to remount it in generally conventional fashion. That might have been enough with a cast better able to playfully infuse the characters with the personalities that the script suggests. Or if the staging were sharper, the choreography less awkward, and the musical accompaniment more in tune.
In 1961, How to Succeed was embraced for its brash but gentle satire of all the nervous businessmen in their grey flannel suits trying not to make waves, and the female-only secretaries whose only dream is to someday marry their bosses. It's like a sanitized version of Mad Men, a safe place where audiences could laugh at cartoon versions of themselves.
With a few exceptions, this cast isn't equipped to punch up the personalities into what librettists Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock, and Willie Gilbert intended for the characters, from the mailroom to the executive offices. At the story's center is a window washer who, armed with a self-help book, sets his sights on the World Wide Wicket Company for his executive ascent. J. Pierpont Finch is a lying, cheating, backstabbing corporate climber, but he's a lovable lying, cheating, backstabbing corporate climber.
The impish Robert Morse played Finch in the original production, and the subsequent Broadway revivals were vehicles for Matthew Broderick and Daniel Radcliffe. Kyle Stoner is properly cuddly in the role, but he is mild of manner and voice and can too easily blend into the surroundings. As the big boss, Kirk Johnson is competent in a role whose name, J.B. Biggley, indicates more harrumphing superciliousness than we get here. Bud Frump, the boss' nephew and another character with a signaling name, is the musical's most comic character, and a miscast Brendon North only hints at its possibilities.
Chloe Condon is genial as Rosemary, Finch's romantic interest, while Nicole Frydman does manage to bring some spark to Smitty, a fellow secretary and Rosemary's main cohort. Mary Kalita knows how to deliver the vavavoom as Hedy LaRue, an abjectly inept secretary who is Biggley's secret paramour. Unfortunately, she's at the center of choreographer AeJay Mitchell's most raggedly performed dance number.
Songwriter Frank Loesser, whose efforts are most celebrated among the musical's creators, has not yet been mentioned. That's because his songs appear, disappear, and only occasionally make much of a mark. And certainly not an exclamation mark, which is the heady goal that BAM! has made for itself.
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying will run through Dec. 19 at Marines' Memorial Theatre. Tickets are $35-$60. Call 415-340-2207 or go to bamsf.org.