Audio By Carbonatix
The production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers at the Country Dinner Playhouse is clean, lively, ingeniously choreographed and fetchingly performed family entertainment. But this rollicking story, based on the 1954 MGM film of the same name, does require more than the usual suspension of disbelief, particularly for adult women under the age of sixty.
Seven brothers live on the family farm up in the mountains. Their ma has died and the place is beginning to look like a pigsty. The boys need their clothes washed and their vittles cooked proper. So big brother Adam (played with appropriate gusto by Robert Yacko) goes to town to find him a wife. He looks over the ladies he meets, but none of them strike him as hardworking enough until he visits the local restaurant. Pretty Milly (Rachel deBenedet in a strong, charming performance) cooks and serves and stands up to the mashers who try her patience. But one look at Adam and the poor orphan falls madly in love. When he proposes, she accepts and marries him on the spot, though her friends try to warn her that Adam has more on his mind than a happy marriage.
After being carried over the threshold of her new home, Milly discovers what Adam was really looking for–a cook and washerwoman for seven men. The situation might daunt any other woman, but not Milly. She refuses to sleep with Adam at first but decides she can’t disgrace him before his brothers. Next morning, Milly begins the long, arduous process of civilizing her men. Table manners and dancing lessons will help her brothers-in-law court women of their own.
When the boys attend a social function in town, Milly introduces them to her friends. It’s the best scene in the show–in dance routines, the brothers duke it out with the town boys over the girls. The dance is so carefully planned for this tiny stage by choreographer Michael Gorman that 21 people jump and glide, cartwheel and arabesque without bumping into each other. Something special comes alive in this scene–the entire cast glows with good spirits.
The boys are now all hopelessly in love, and courting takes too long. Adam has been reading Plutarch (no kidding) and uses the Roman story of the rape of the Sabine women as historical precedent for kidnapping the town girls. Snowed in for the winter, the mountain house is safe from invasion by irate parents and suitors. But Milly is ticked off. The boys–including Adam, who must learn how to behave properly toward women–are banished to the barn.
The plot here is such a stretch that it’s hard to believe it packs any punch at all anymore. So why do audiences eat it up so voraciously? The story is really about sexual energy held in check by the forces of civilization: The women may be brood mares, but by gum, they’ll be brood mares on their own terms. The guys are barely literate barbarians who only want to find mates and reproduce. And the musical-comedy format both exploits and mocks the age-old dichotomy.
An elderly couple sitting next to me got a kick out of every single veiled sexual reference, as did most of the audience. The veiling of such references in effect gives sex greater significance, making it seem less nasty. Perhaps older people are attracted to this mild sexual humor because they’re used to thinking in larger terms than are today’s disenchanted yuppies.
Seven Brides is less sentimental than other film musicals such as The Sound of Music, largely because its characters are far more interested in procreating than they are with facing a crisis with smiles on their faces and songs in their hearts. It may be a tough nut for younger audiences, especially feminists, but its appeal to an older generation of romantics makes its own kind of amiable sense.