"How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying"

“How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”
A Musical Comedy with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser, based on the novel by Shepherd Mead, with musical direction by Michael Shahani
Presented by the City College of San Francisco; directed and choreographed by Deborah Shaw.

You have only three more opportunies to see "How to Suceed in Business Without Really Trying" (see below)

Once again, for the Spring Semester, Deborah Shaw and Michael Shahani bring a hit musical to the Diego Rivera theatre on the City College campus. Last year, they triumphed with their production of “Cabaret.” This year it’s the early 1960s era's “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” set in 1961.
Iain Gray heads up the cast of over 20 as window washer soon to become Chairman of the Board at the World Wide Wickett Company. He plays the role made famous both on Broadway and in the film by a “New Faces” talent, Robert Morse: J. Pierrepont Finch. (Gray has an English accent, which, rather than detract, fits in perfectly with his affected name.) Gray gives Finch a boyish charm that masks his calculating mind. His competition is company President J. B. Biggley’s nephew, Bud Frump, played with perfect jealous pique by an animated Spencer Peterson, in argyle sweater-vest and Harold Lloyd glasses. Peterson ignites every scene with his obvious rambunctious joy at the opportunity to live in Frump’s cunningly deceitful body.

The musical opens with Finch on a window washer’s scaffold, his back to the audience, perusing the book from which the production gets its title. Seeing no future in washing windows for a career, he launches himself on a path to defeat Frump and eventually unseat Biggley. The role of J. B. is acted by Dennis Chase, who gives Biggley just enough pomposity and cluelessness to make us care about him.
Finch is helped in his rise not only by assiduously following the book, but by his own glibness and his ability to take advantage when opportunities arise. He flatters J. B.’s secretary Miss Jones (Janet Lohr) and finagles meetings with J. B. and flirts with secretaries: love-struck Rosemary (a sweet Megan Dueck) and her sympathetic, sharp gal pal, Smitty (Miquela Sierra). All along, Frump schemes to trip Finch up, but everything he does seems only to work out in Finch’s favor and Finch quickly rises to the top. Until Frump gets Finch, now Vice-president of Advertising, to propose his own failed plan for a TV show.

The cast breaks into musical numbers throughout, backed by a live band. Megan Dueck, as Rosemary, wants to be Finch’s sweetheart, she sings “Happy To Keep His Dinner Warm,” daydreaming about her duties as a corporate wife. A couple of songs from the original Broadway production ended up on the top 40 and heard ad infinitum, sung by Sammy Davis Junior and other stars of that era: “I Believe in You,” and “The Brotherhood of Man.”

Everyone who has worked in an office at some point in his or her life, can relate to scenes like the coffee break, when employees go crazy when the coffee person announces one morning that there’s no coffee, the ever-present ding of an elevator, and its doors sliding open and closing. The potted palms, the “executive” chair, the desk and the side chair, file cabinets, the lame décor and corporate color schemes, all wonderfully imagined by set designer Patrick Toebe and his crew. Costumes by Susan Linneman are in keeping with the times. For the company party, Rosemary wants to shed her secretarial image and be sexy for Finch; she shows up in a red dress, only to discover that every other woman had the same idea.

Things heat up when a new secretary is hired, Hedy (an outstanding Geneva Holloman), a blond of the Judy Holliday type from “Born Yesterday,” crossed with Dolly Parton without Parton’s intelligence. She’s been mixed up with J. B, but of course, no one’s supposed to know, still everyone gossips. Frump works hard to implicate Finch and Hedy in a scandal, which backfires.

An exuberant, talented cast and chorus adds energy and spice, accompanied by upbeat musical numbers. Don’t be surprised to hear yourself singing, “I Believe in You” when you leave the theatre. As Deborah Shaw notes in the program: “This [is] the perfect send-up of the mores and morals of corporate life and the thirst for success.”

"How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" plays tonight, April 24, 8PM, Saturday, April 25,8PM and Sunday, April 26 at 2PM