Prompt 14--The Drowsy Chaperone

I think that the main distinction between the fictional Drowsy Chaperone musical and the frame of the Man around it is largely based in ambiguity.  In the musical-within-the-play, there is not much ambiguity—we know that the good guys are going to get married because the play is a comedy, and, of course, they do get married, along with everyone else.  By the end of the play, there really are not any questions to answer—Robert marries Janet, Tottendale marries the Underling, Aldolpho marries the drowsy chaperone, and Fieldzig marries Kitty.  However, within the frame story, nothing is so clear.  We know the Man’s opinions on theatre, as expressed in the very beginning, and we certainly know his opinions about The Drowsy Chaperone.  We don’t know anything else about him, even at the end of the play.  What does it mean when he is “flown into the flies”?  What does that say about his character?

Duration is also treated much differently between the frame story and the Drowsy Chaperone musical.  In the musical, there is a lot of time spent on some pretty silly stuff—take, for instance, the extended tap breaks in many songs and the sheer length of time spent on the utterly meaningless “Toledo Surprise.”  There’s also the spit-take scene, which, if it weren’t for the Man’s kind insistence that we skip through that scene, we would presumably have to watch it for much longer in the actual Drowsy Chaperone.  In the frame story, the duration is spent almost exclusively on the Man expressing his opinions on musical theatre and The Drowsy Chaperone.  Also, I find it pretty interesting that the song “Message from a Nightingale” only exists within the frame, actually, and does not exist in the fictional Drowsy Chaperone musical, so that would be one example of that frivolous, silly scene actually taking space in the frame, not in the musical itself.