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Before there was rock and roll, there was doo-wop. Before The Four Seasons, The Temptations and The Four Tops, there were The Four Aces, The Four Freshmen and The Ames Brothers.
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It’s the doo-woppers, those fresh-faced four-man harmonic groups of the 1950s celebrated in Stage West’s production of Forever Plaid, an easy-to-listen music revue that’s easy to like.
Created by Stuart Ross in 1987, it made its Off-Broadway debut two years later in a small nightclub theater where it enjoyed a five-year run. Forever Plaid has remained popular with professional theaters ever since and is particularly suitable for a dinner theater during the summer as it runs for 90 minutes without a break.
Four exceptional singers are required to handle the intricate harmonies, catchy choreography and spirited humor of Ross’ script, which Stage West has found in Mark Allan, Devon Brayne, Graham Coffeng and Seth Johnson.
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It also requires seasoned musicians like Konrad Pluta, Jeremy Coates and Jeff Fafard who know how to coddle the show’s 20 old songs and a director/choreographer like Liz Gilroy who can lovingly recreate the simplistic hand gestures and movements that defined these groups. .
So Stage West apparently had all their bases covered for this show, except it didn’t feature COVID. Coffeng tested positive and there was no substitute, so for the opening week he had to be isolated in the booth usually reserved for musicians on stage for this show.
It was a truly unique experience watching Coffeng perform all of his routines in the booth while Allan, Brayne and Johnson reckoned where he would have been onstage. These are four talented professionals. Coffeng has now been cleared to return to the stage.
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It’s a thin plot in Forever Plaid that holds the songs, the jokes, and the nostalgia together. In their senior year of high school, Jinx, Smudge, Frankie, and Sparky formed The Plaids, dreaming that one day they’d be recording albums, playing top music venues, and even appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show. They were on their way to see The Beatles make their Ed Sullivan Show debut when the Plaid van collided with a school bus full of Catholic school girls. The girls survived but the boys did not. Through some kind of divine intervention, the boys have been allowed to return to Earth for one night to give the concert of their dreams.
It’s fun to watch them fumble and find their groove as they prepare to sing along to songs like Three Coins in the Fountain, Gotta Be This/Gotta Be That, and Moments to Remember, but it still feels like a concert rather than a musical. Then the magic happens. The boys begin to interact, let their guard down and reveal some of their backstories, and the more we learn about them, the more we appreciate them and their styles.
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Jinx (Allan) and Smudge (Brayne) are step-siblings and being Plaids was a way to escape the uneven dynamics of home. Sparky (Johnson) is a bundle of irrepressible optimism and energy, and Frankie (Coffeng) is the group’s animating philosopher.
Tributes to Perry Como, ’50s Cardigan Guy and The Ed Sullivan Show are hilarious and remind us that Allan, Brayne, Coffeng and Johnson can handle comedy as well as they can handle harmonies in their homage to Calypso styles. by Harry Belafonte.
By the time the boys are ready to sing their final number, Love is a Many Splendored Thing, which will likely send them back to the underworld, we’re just as grateful as they are for this concert we just shared.
Forever Plaid runs at Stage West through September 4.
