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Home > Blogs > Things to do in Butler County > Archives > 2011 > March > 14 > Entry
La Comedia’s ‘Seven Brides for Seven Brothers’ engages
La Comedia’s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers was quite the engaging show, even if it wasn’t quite the diamond I hoped it would be.
The fact that I’m a fiend for MGM musicals worked both for and against this show. The 1954 film directed by Stanley Donen is one of the great movie musicals, with the highlight being the social scene with the seven brides, seven brothers and their nemeses dancing all around the CinemaScope frame. I was very curious to see how La Comedia’s version would capture that legendary Michael Kidd choreography.
Very, very well, as it turns out. La Comedia may not have as big a stage as MGM had a soundstage, but the theater’s choreography is phenomenal. The dancing is absolutely dizzying. I can’t imagine having the blood rush to my head so many times in one night, let alone doing it for several shows a week.
The show and the film center around Adam (Christopher Lukos), a woodsman with a lusty voice who goes looking for a wife. He finds one in the spunky Milly (Caroline Kobylarz), who is swept off her feet — literally. What Adam doesn’t tell Milly is that he also lives with six siblings who are even less refined than he is.
As long as the stage show sticks to what was in the MGM musical, it works well. The two leads are great fun to watch. Lukos makes a very good approximation of Howard Keel, and I actually preferred Kobylarz to Jane Powell, who was always a little too frilly for my taste. The various shenanigans with the socially inadequate brothers are good for many laughs.
It’s when the stage show departs from the film that the former falters a bit. As often happens when adapting film musicals to the stage, new songs were added. The additions by Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn are completely forgettable, paling in comparison to the Johnny Mercer/Gene de Paul songs from the film.
The climactic scenes of the film featured an avalanche, something that’s not easy to duplicate on stage, and the ending feels a bit underwhelming when most of what came before it was so spritely. I had a better time at La Comedia’s previous show, Nana’s Naughty Knickers, perhaps because I expected less of it.
Still, when the performers come out for their curtain calls, I couldn’t help but smile. Too bad the brides didn’t throw out seven bouquets, I wouldn’t have minded catching one.
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