Word: saints
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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After a snappy opening number introduces Saint Misbehavin' Hospital-"If you're stricken with psoriasis/ We might think it's leprosy/ But in the final analysis/ Saint M's the place to be"-the action lags a bit. A too-complicated sequence establishes that the hospital's chief of staff, Dr. Xavier Lyfe (John Claflin), is keeping a mistress in the hospital at government expense...
...pace picks up halfway through the first act, when Denuar arrives at Saint M's and blackmails Dr. Lyfe into helping with the subterfuge. But a civic-minded faction of the hospital's staff, outraged over the chief of staff's Medicaid scam, learns of Denuar's plan. Led by the hospital's German-accented head nurse, the authoritarian Barb Dwyer (Jon Blackstone), the insurgents resolve to bring down Dr. Lyfe while winning the fortune for themselves. They will share their information with one of the billionaire's daughters in exchange for a share of her inheritance...
...Miss Anne Thrope (Todd Fletcher). If Miss Anne cries crocodile tears while her sisters and stepmothers celebrate Denuar's death, she will gain his confidence--and eventually the lion's share of his estate. Secretly, Nurse Dwyer plans to bring about the horseshoe mogul's death with arsenic from Saint...
...Saint Misbehavin' is jam-packed with good lyrics-maybe too jam-packed with good lyrics. It's difficult to say, because in many instances so many words are squeezed onto each measure of music that whatever is being said on stage disintegrates by the time it reaches the audience. This mattered less on opening night, when there was a fair bit of screaming by roommates in the audience, than it might on night two, three or 26. In the Pudding's tradition, however, one pun begets another...
These are real groaners, which is to say, exactly what Pudding audiences are after. Unfortunately, Saint Misbehavin' doesn't deliver the inside Harvard humor of past theatricals. The obligatory Wellesley gag-which I wouldn't give away if it weren't so lame-comes when the evil Nurse Dwyer threatens to send Emmanuelle Leighbor (Carl "B.J." Fox)-the subtly played, airheaded nurse who elsewhere calls flowers "the most beautiful things on God's earth"-back to a certain Route 30 finishing school...