Fabulous Lipitones keeps it light, hits the high notes
These days, how do you talk about race without hitting a sour note?
If you follow the lead of playwrights Mark St. Germain and John Markus, you slather the subject in a generous helping of four part harmonies, spread it atop a buddy comedy and throw in a sprinkling of geriatric dirty jokes.
Germain and Markus’ The Fabulous Lipitones is the latest production from local director/ producer duo Ted Price and Anne Laughlin. The production runs until March 18, except for Mondays, at ArtSpace above Books and Company.
The play is a light-hearted comedy centred around a barbershop quartet in search of a fourth member. The play opens at the funeral of Andy, the recently deceased member of the quartet, who passed while managing to hold a high B-flat in the middle of a regional barbershop contest. His quartet-mates, Wally, Howard and Phil are not only heartbroken about the death of their friend, but are anxious the funeral might spell a break-up of their four-part fellowship.
The men have been together for close to 30 years, and Andy’s demise occurs just as their group, the Fabulous Lipitones, has hit its peak, reaching the semi-final of the Barbershop Quartet Championships.
David Talbot plays Wally, a pharmacist somewhere close to his 60’s who still lives with his mother. Gordon Roberts plays the decidedly Trump-ish Phil, who owns a tanning salon/gym. Phil and Wally use the living room of Howard, played by Stephen Aberle, as a sort of clubhouse and rehearsal space, while trading gossip about Howard’s ailing wife’s past marital indiscretions with a Jehovah’s witness.
The three men decide to try out a prospective fourth member of their group, Bob, after overhearing him sing in the background while making a call to Phil’s mechanic. Bob, it turns out, is actually Baba Mati Singh, a pitch perfect tenor who also happens to be a turbaned Sikh man and undocumented immigrant. The clash of cultures between the old school barbershop guys and the hipper Singh, whose musical tastes range from the Rat Pack to Lady Gaga, is mostly played for laughs but is a source of ongoing tension with Phil.
The interplay between Phil and Bob is where the production’s political commentary is allowed to play out. Roberts plays the often cringe-worthy Phil with a crossedarms sarcasm that reminded me of many past co-workers and more than a few family dinner table conversations. But Markus and St. Germain give Bob most of the better lines of the production, making his unflappable character the most relatable.
Roberts somehow manages to play the role of Phil in an off-putting but not completely hateable manner, balancing the Archie Bunker-like racial slurs with a kind of comedic straight man performance. His performance gives Aberle and Talbot plenty to play off.
Talbot, who’s character Wally has recently joined an online dating app built solely for pharmacists, delivers the production’s best gags, while Aberle navigates the tensions of the quartet as the eminently reasonable Howard, who serves as a sort of gravitational centre for the friendship of the three men.
Matt Lacas’ Bob, meanwhile, manages to provide a needed spike of energy in each of his scenes. While his Indian accent occasionally wanders into the territory of the Apu character from the Simpsons, his character’s enthusiasm for old-school tunes becomes infectious.
The Fabulous Lipitones revels in the appeal of holding onto old-school relics, like barbershop harmonies. It’s comfort-food stuff. The goofy-guys-with-nice-singingvoices formula works well, but the production’s achievement is its ability to keep the laughs coming while ably stickhandling around the sticky politics.