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“Linda and I were talking about it the other day,” said Scot Whitney, who runs Harlequin with his wife, Linda Whitney, the driving force behind the Stardust shows. “She said, ‘World War II lasted for four years and we’ve stretched it out for 17.’”
Harlequin’s love affair with the 1940s actually began 19 years ago with a production called “The 1940s Radio Hour.” They followed that up with “The Holiday Broadcast of 1943” and then began creating their own holiday originals.
Through the years, more than 150 singers, dancers and musicians have performed more than 300 songs from the 1940s, from the familiar to the obscure, and Linda Whitney has kept track of the date on which each production was set. (The years of the Stardust sagas are 1941 to 1948.)
This year’s, for example, falls on Dec. 21, 1942. “It was a Monday,” she said. “Monday in theater is usually a dark day; it’s a day when everyone can get some rest.”
But on that night, the performers at the Stardust Club are set not to rest, but to party. It seems that a young flier is headed off to Europe and his friends are planning a fitting sendoff. The complication (there’s always a complication in the world of “Stardust”): A Chaplinesque fellow from the Internal Revenue Service arrives with evidence of unpaid taxes and wants to close the place down.
The show shares the plot of the original “Stardust Serenade,” which Harlequin staged in 1993. “To say ‘revival’ is stretching it a bit,” Whitney said. “It’s been almost completely rewritten to fit the performers that I have in the show this year.”
Among this year’s cast members are returning Stardusters Alison Monda, Matt Posner and Megan Tyrrell – and, of course, Harlequin musical director Bruce Whitney, who leads the band and serves as an additional character.
“This one was the best-attended of any of them ever,” Linda Whitney said of the first “Serenade.” “Over 7,000 people saw it. Of course, that was a different environment, a different economy.”
It’s also a different time now than it was in 1992 when the theater began revisiting the swing-dancing era of the big band.
“The folks for whom that music was part of their youth are passing on – sad but true,” she said. “The swing dance craze was huge when we started doing these shows. Your cultural communication factors shift over time. Something like ‘Christmas Carol’ or ‘The Nutcracker’ truly is ageless. It’s really hard to take a slice of popular culture and make it ageless.”
Next year, she said, the spirit of Stardust will live even if the club has been relegated to the dustbin of history. “I’m going to attempt at least to reinvent it in a new form and maybe with music that connects with later generations,” she said.
