By Dale King
Promises, Promises, the musical now playing at the Broward Stage Door Theatre, brings together assorted material from seemingly disparate sources. Still, the show holds together very well, particularly in the second act when the comedy kicks into overdrive and the players truly find their vocal and acting muses.
The show, which completes its five-week run with a matinee at 2 p.m. Sunday, takes up the better part of three hours. That does push the siesta meter at tad, but during a recent performance, there was nary a snore in the house.
Promises, Promises is based on the 1960 film, “The Apartment,” with a screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond. The show was drawn from a book by Neil Simon, and Burt Bacharach and Hal David provided the words and music. The 1968 show got a bit more Bacharach-David-like in 2010 when two of their more familiar songs, “I Say a Little Prayer” and “A House Is Not a Home” were added to the score.
The cast spends a lot of time singing and dancing around a big insurance company filled with lots of cute girls and married guys looking for some afternoon delights. To curry favor with the higher-ups, executive wannabe Chuck Baxter (Elliot Peterson) allows his apartment to be used for romantic trysts in return for promises of promotion (as in the song, “Upstairs”).
It works — to a point. J.D. Shelldrake (James Skiba), the company’s powerful but unscrupulous personnel director, picks up on the deal and actually promotes Chuck to a low-level executive job in return for sole use of the apartment (“Our Little Secret”).
As it turns out, Chuck has his eye — and his heart — set on Fran Kubelik (Jessica Brooke Sanford), a waitress in the company cafeteria. But she’s also the married Mr. Shelldrake’s lady on the side. And that dangerous liaison sucks Chuck into a maelstrom. The eventual resolution takes the cast through a lot of songs, some tender, others cute, and some intriguing and wryly humorous dialogue.
In their lead roles, Sanford and Peterson — both making their Broward Stage Door debuts — have a songs and lines to shoulder. In fact, music helps Peterson’s character grow, from the “puny” little guy that opens the show (“Half as Big as Life”) to the strange admission, “She Loves Basketball” to his strong, confident delivery of the show’s signature song in the finale. By then, he has shown his true inner strength.
Sanford, who displays a vast array of emotions, draws heavily from the Bacharach-David well, singing “I Say a Little Prayer” when flowers arrive from a stranger; performing a very sad version of “A House Is Not a Home” and the tearful, “Whoever You Are, I Love You,” an unspecific plea for someone to make her happy.
She and Peterson sing “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” as a duet, with Sanford accompanying on guitar.
Directed by Broadway-trained Michael Leeds, Promises Promises features a number of characters who tickle the audience’s collective funny bones. A despondent Chuck spends Christmas Eve drinking away his troubles at a bar where he meets another tipsy loner, Marge MacDougall, played with intoxicating charm and a savage wit by Ashley Rubin.
Bob Levitt is particularly entertaining as Dr. Dryfuss, Chuck’s neighbor who comes to the rescue to revive Fran when she suffers “an overdose of fruitcake,” as Chuck and the doctor tell Fran’s bully brother, Karl (David Vogel). We’re not certain where Levitt has been, but now that he’s back, he should stick around and perform.
Speaking of bullies, Jeffrey Leshansky is particularly nasty as Dobitch, one of Chuck’s apartment users who was cut out of the Sheldrake deal. Leshansky has stage credentials all over the map, from Stage Door to the Wick and New York.
Another character who rolled off the bully pile is Shelldrake, portrayed with quiet nastiness by Skiba. He’s a bad guy who doesn’t put it on the front burner. He’s a lot like Dan Aykroyd’s smarmy businessman, Irwin Mainway, and he has the vocal inflections to match.
As Miss Olsen, Shelldrake’s secretary, Meredith Bartmon steps out from under his thumb to confront him nose-to-nose about his untoward behavior. She does a nice job revving up her courage to give her character some last-minute bravado.
Promises, Promises concludes with a matinee Sunday at the Broward Stage Door Theatre, 8036 W. Sample Road, Margate. For tickets, call 954-344-7765.