AURORA | The long-standing tradition of the rhythmically predictable American sit-com hasn’t been killed off just yet.
At least, not at the Vintage Theatre in Aurora.
Ceaseless punchlines? Check. Excessive eye rolling and exaggerated frowns? By the bucket-load. Crass, hollow jokes about love, sex and marriage? Naturally.
The only missing ingredient that would have turned the Vintage’s current summer production, “Always A Bridesmaid,” into an 8 p.m. front runner is a laugh track. Well, that and a campy, brassy theme song accompanied by 30 to 60 seconds of goofy glances at the camera and an undue number of aerial shots of a fill-in-the-blank coastal city.
Add those last two tidbits and a time machine set to 1992 to the mix, and the Vintage crew would be wheelbarrowing away offers from NBC/ABC/CBS execs.
Update: It’s not 1992.
Penned by Jessie Jones, Nicholas Hope and Jamie Wooten, “Bridesmaid” is a simple, shallow, though not wholly unenjoyable nod to a bygone era. It’s tethered to a period not quite as far removed as some of the other antiquities the Vintage has dusted off in recent years (i.e. the cultish “Harold and Maude” and the showy “Mack and Mabel”) but the likes and comedic prowess of Danny Tanner and Dr. Frasier Crane feel dated nonetheless.
Set in a parlor in Laurelton, Virginia, “Bridesmaid” centers on a group of garish girlfriends who make a youthful promise to always take part in one another’s nuptials. Unsurprisingly, the bulk of the pack cuts the cake more than once, which is how we get 90 minutes of recurring antics and here-we-go-again parades down the aisle. In a plot that spans seven years, the pals slowly and predictably develop a hackneyed sense of wisdom that culminates in a “men come and go, but I’m so happy to have you ladies” type of final comment that is expected to be sputtered from roughly the opening monologue.
Fresh off the Henry Award-winning production of the uber-heady “‘Night, Mother” at the Vintage this spring, it seems director Lorraine Scott was looking for an understandable change of pace — a pliant softball out of which she could tickle a few bargain laughs and not much more. She’s succeeded.
The show, and by-in-large the performances, make for a whole-lot of surface-level gimmickry drizzled with tinsel-coated wisecracks. Over four short acts, the hodgepodge of gags play out like those from a lost script of “The Golden Girls” (and they very well could have, as Wooten was a writer and producer on the silver-haired program for several years), as they’re clearly catered to an audience raised on Mary Tyler Moore’s soaring hat and Archie Bunker’s eternal cigar.
The relentless comedic battery is not entirely intolerable, but in 2015, any critique on The Holy Institution demands more acerbity than zingers such as, “all I want is a nice guy who hates the same stuff as I do.” Sigh.
Though Cindy Laudadio-Hill as Charlie and Rachel Bouchard as the bubbly, increasingly crapulous Kari stand an inch or two higher in their heels than the rest of the pack, the six-woman cast is a lesson in outdoing the sum of its parts. Laudadio-Hill entertains as a sullen Birkenstock enthusiast, and Bouchard commands during her twangy soliloquies, though neither truly earns the coveted epithet of scene/script/show-stealer. The remaining clan, composed of Cindy Hall, Chip Winn Wells, Suzanne Nepi and Kathi Wood all come through with their zippy brand of farce, but score best when working collectively to produce a steady rat-a-tat.
Despite an uphill push from the sextet onstage and some diverting costumes courtesy of designer Christine Samar, “Bridesmaid,” in the end, relies too heavily on the crutch cultivated by years of Blanche and the gang’s misadventures. Not to mention a not-too-successful attempt to usurp some limelight shone on the niche genre of wedding preparation by Kristen Wiig’s charming 2011 flick of nearly identical name. The Vintage lands a few chortles here, but the way in which the theater so often seems to rejuvenate time-honored scripts becomes distorted when applied to a phase in canned entertainment that isn’t even quite over — depending on who you ask— and wasn’t too enlightened to begin with: the sitcom span.
If knowing exactly when and where you’re going to get your comedic druthers is how you get your kicks, it may behoove you to scoot over to Dayton Street faster than you can say “who can turn the world on with her smile?” If you swore off the laugh track after Chandler Bing and Ray Barone ditched the scene in the younger half of last decade, it may be best to keep a bouqet’s backward toss away from this one.
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“Always a Bridesmaid”
7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2:30 p.m. Sunday. The Vintage Theatre, 1468 Dayton St. Tickets are $32 at the door, $28 in advance. Call 303-856-7830 or visit vintagetheatre.com for more information. The show runs through Aug. 30.