Sure as shootin’, pardners, Desperate Measures is a rootin’, tootin’, scootin’, hootin’ Wild West musical comedy that likely will tickle those customers whose lower funny bones are within easy reach. It’s an awfully broad show for my finicky taste, but hey, not everything’s got to be Shakespeare, right?
Actually, the plot for Desperate Measures is distilled (kinda sorta) from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.
Set somewhere out West in the 1890s, the story involves Sister Mary Jo, a postulant on the brink of becoming a nun, who learns that Johnny, her scapegrace cowboy of a brother, is about to be hanged for his fatal role in a barroom shoot-out over the soiled charms of Bella Rose, a saloon girl. At the behest of kindly Sheriff Green, Mary Jo seeks a pardon, but the territory Governor lecherously demands that she trade her chastity for Johnny’s freedom.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★ review here.]
Then the Sheriff and Mary Jo hatch a desperate scheme to clandestinely switch out her virtuous person with the willing Bella Rose one dark midnight in the Governor’s bed. Comical complications, as they say, thereafter ensue.
The prickly moral points and sardonic fangs of Shakespeare’s considerably darker original have been removed for this sunny little show, which obviously wants to be nothing more than a pleasant light entertainment that spoofs melodramatic horse operas. The farcical book and lyrics have been neatly crafted along old-fashioned musical comedy lines by Peter Kellogg, who renders it all in rhymes so easygoing that you scarcely notice them.
Everything goes along nicely with a cheerful batch of fiddle-dee-dee country-style tunes composed by David Friedman. Four musicians brightly render the upbeat score with piano and strings, accented with colorful touches of mandolin, banjo and harmonica.
Effectively costumed by Nicole Wee, six performers ably portray their cartoon characters within a rustic setting designed by James Morgan to suggest that the show is unfolding inside a barn. Sarah Parnicky’s prim yet not entirely proper Mary Jo contrasts against Lauren Molina’s irrepressibly bodacious Bella Rose. Molina’s lusty lady is matched with a dumb-and-dumber Johnny drolly portrayed by Conor Ryan. Both actors employ extravagant body language to express their characters, and their knockabout “Just for You” duet in a jailhouse is a comical highlight. Lower in key, Peter Saide lends his handsome voice and presence to the proceedings as the poker-faced Sheriff.
The remaining roles are tricky to handle but two veterans do them up neatly. Father Morse is a usually drunken priest whose running gag involves a preoccupation with Nietzsche’s grim philosophies; it’s a weird, unfunny character but Gary Marachek manages to dig up a few laughs. Even more challenging to depict palatably is the Governor, a Teutonic-accented lecher, martinet and cheat: Nick Wyman puts a twinkle into the old boy’s eye and instills a giddy nature into his machinations and somehow makes him seem oddly adorable.
Top honors, however, must go to Bill Castellino, the show’s director and choreographer. Cultivating these dandy performances and nimbly staging their doings with speed and good humor in apt visual circumstances, Castellino has shaped a trivial, tumbleweed affair into a modestly diverting Off Broadway attraction at New World Stages. For the record, let’s mention that the original production, which The York Theatre Company premiered in 2017, recently won an Outer Critics Circle Award as best musical and also two Drama Desk Awards for its music and lyrics. While Desperate Measures is not my cup of sarsaparilla, evidently the show appeals to plenty of others.
