Women’s roles in wartime rarely have been so smartly and poignantly portrayed as in “The Hello Girls.”
Ross Valley Players are staging the 2018 musical drama co-written by Peter C. Mills and Cara Reichel, which starts in World War I as U.S. servicemen are fighting in France. Dispatches were being screwed up because male American telephone switchboard operators couldn’t speak French, and their French counterparts lacked English.
Enter the Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit.
“The Hello Girls” tracks the misogyny French-speaking females suffered at the hands of their peers and superiors, all the way “up the chain” to stalwart Gen. John “Blackjack” Pershing, played by Joseph Walters with appropriate gruffness.
The feel-good story focuses on Grace Banker, the women’s leader, and four other bilingual operators. Monica Rose Slater adroitly portrays Banker, who is often stone-faced, a countenance befitting keeping her underlings in line—until she starts singing and smiling, often with wide-eyed mugging. She clearly has the most resonant voice of the 10-member cast. Grace Margaret Craig displays comic chops as sharp mouthed operator Suzanne Prevot.
Mills composed the sometimes-similar jazz and ragtime songs in the two-act, two-and-half-hour show. The dense lyrics are geared to move the story along, and the tunes lack memorable riffs. However, some numbers are pleasant: the opener “Answer the Call”; the bouncy title tune “Hello Girls”; the first-act finale “Lives on the Line”; the second-act opener “The Front” and “Making History,” which details what happened after the time period of the show, as the “girls” fought to be recognized as soldiers for decades.
Only a few numbers near the schmaltzy ending—such as “The Lost Battalion,” a solo by promoted Capt. Riser (Nelson Brown) that’s a study in poignancy—deal with the horrors of war.
None of Mills’ melodies are as exciting as snippets of standards such as “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” that are included. And those morsels aren’t nearly as good as the upbeat choruses of signature tunes from each U.S. military branch, belted by the full cast in a patriotic medley.
The actors playfully display their abilities on myriad instruments — keyboard, drums, double-bass, cello, violin, flute and accordion. While they’re probably not either Juilliard or San Francisco Symphony material, they play well enough to create an illusion of mastery.
Director Maeve Smith ensures that the performers’ singing and dancing are in sync, and that their facial expressions and body language convey precisely the right mood.
Ron Krempetz’s set is marvelous and eye-catching; cross-hatched wires and bright lights reveal how critical phone messages were to the war effort.
Costumes by Valera Coble providing an accurate sense of the era range from blue military outfits with high necklines, puffy sleeves and long skirts, and contrasting colorful civilian garb, for the women, and olive drab uniforms and army helmets and ammo belts for the men. All that, plus heavy boots!
Jonathan Blue’s choreography, predominantly cutesy, can’t help but evoke smiles.
Props are few, and the switchboard is invisible. However, the actors make it real by simulating plug-in motions and serving up perfect harmony, musically and in demeanor.
While it was difficult to watch how the women were rebuffed in their efforts to be in the middle of the action “at the front,” the show’s comedy goes down easier, such as the scene where the women are learning ever-changing secret phone system codes that force them to be trilingual, to know French, English and gibberish.
Ross Valley Players’ “The Hello Girls” runs through March 1 in the Barn Theatre, Marin Art & Garden Center, 30 Sir Francis Blvd., Ross. Tickets are $30-$45 at rossvalleyplayers.com.
Find Sherwood “Woody” Weingarten, a member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle and the author of four books at voodee@sbcglobal.net, woodyweingarten.com or vitalitypress.com.