‘Forever Plaid’ — A swinging start to Festival 56

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Festival 56’s seventh season is off to a running start with “Forever Plaid” by Stuart Ross and James Raitt, a compendium of 1950s close-harmony quartet standards. While it’s largely an excuse to bring out old favorites like “Three Coins in a Fountain” and “Catch a Falling Star,” the show also offers a small lesson in the redemptive power of being part of a vocal ensemble, the amazing experience of “being inside a good tight chord,” as Francis, the Plaids’ front man puts it near the end of the show. In fact, in the context of the show, this is the group’s second chance, an opportunity to perform the concert that a fatal car crash prevented them from doing. The irony is that the group was doomed as much by the coming of rock and roll (the bus that hit them was filled with parochial school Beatles’ fans), so the show’s wistfulness is for a style of music that has been eclipsed as well as for lost opportunities.
 The set for the show is a subtle tribute to plaid and mid-century design (also a play on a comment in the show that the Plaids’ sound “is to contemporary music as Formica is to marble”). Julianne Merrill and Wyanet’s own Al Brown keep cool and capable hands at the piano and upright bass accompaniment, respectively.
 The four men of the Plaids, Brian Harrington (Francis), Nathan Freeman (Sparky), Evan Martin (Jynx), and Kevin Martin (Smudge), work and blend well as a vocal ensemble, an absolute essential for this type of show, and they certainly can “sell” a song. As an acting ensemble, they work mainly in broad strokes. If there’s any dramatic arc to the show, it’s a movement from shock (and stage fright) at being back in front of an audience (from the time warp of the Great Beyond) to a realization that they are achieving a level of performance they had not previously been capable of, yet, particularly in the case of Evan Martin, a deer-in-headlights stare fast-cuts into a vocal ease that would have made Nat King Cole proud. We don’t see much of the interior transitions from “I can’t do this” to “Hey, I AM doing this!”
 Kevin Martin stands out as the nerdy Smudge; a running joke of his inability to tell left from right stays fresh, and he delivers a sweet monologue on old 45s and the aspirations of the Plaids. He also sets up a sock puppet joke that circles back nicely in an energetic Ed Sullivan homage (folks under 40 may need to Google “Ed Sullivan Show” to get all the jokes). Nathan Freeman, as Sparky, doesn’t quite put across the frustration of being second lead in the group, but he’s the most assured musician, doing nice turns both on melodica (that odd mouth-accordion keyboard instrument) and piano, and his solo in the Perry Como tribute “Catch a Falling Star” shows off a crisp focused tenor, though it’s far from a Como-esque croon. Brian Harrington plays front man Francis largely as an emcee — perhaps too comfortably for a guy who’s trying to reach further than his grasp.

But I’m quibbling over small details. What really satisfies about “Forever Plaid” is luxuriating in those familiar guy-group chords and relishing the unselfconscious fun of the production numbers. The calypso montage at the end of Act I will send you out doing the limbo.
 “Forever Plaid” runs through July 3 at the Grace Performing Arts Center at 316 S. Main St. in Princeton.

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