The four heroes of Forever Plaid gain confidence as they add tartan to their orignially white costumes.Racheal McCaig
In the 1950s, an era of pioneers and great invention in popular music, there was also a lilywhite subgenre involving the fresh faces and four-part harmonies of clean-cut crooners such as the Four Aces and the Four Freshmen. Their safe sounds were a balm for the times – something for people to hum along to while they were building bomb shelters, and something lighter than rock, honky-tonk and so-called race music.
Symbolically we can look at Feb. 9, 1964, as the specific date this music for the docile died. That day the Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show, and it's the place in time the Plaids (a fictitious foursome of sweet-singing dorks whose "story" is told in the jokey jukebox musical Forever Plaid) went out of fashion in a big way.
At the Panasonic Theatre the music lives again. The Toronto venue was called the New Yorker in 1993, when the hit off-Broadway revue premiered in Canada. Now Stuart Ross's Forever Plaid is revived.
We meet our four lovable lads as they come to grips with their own Lazarus-like situation: They had died in an automobile mishap, but now are able to give the concert they were never good enough to give while they were alive. Frankie is the fair-haired heartthrob; Jinx hits high like Frankie Valli; Sparky is self-described; and stage-struck Smudge is a little strange.
"Holy cannoli!" one of them cries, grasping this unlikely after-life engagement. And cannoli indeed, as Forever Plaid is nothing if not cheesy confection. They wear white dinner jackets at first, but progress in competence and confidence as they add tartan garments. Their harmonies are vise-tight, and they are earnest in their shamelessness.
The humour is straight-up cornball – if you like shenanigans, this is your Shangri-La. The premise is uncomplicated (and perhaps inspired by the 1980 Canadian film Hank Williams: The Show He Never Gave).
But the hits swing and the love songs waft melodiously. We hear Hoagy Carmichael's Heart and Soul, Sam Cooke's Chain Gang and more from the age. We like to romanticize the 1950s as a simpler time, and perhaps it was if you're comfortable with McCarthyism, Jim Crow segregation and Cold War tensions.
The music made by the guy groups then was a harmless distraction, and so is Forever Plaid. Memories are inexact, but nostalgia is the same as it ever was.
Forever Plaid runs until June 12 (mirvish.com).
Brad Wheeler