The Full Monty: All Kinds of Exposure

Everybody knows the secret

They all know what their life should be

And they move like a river

Everybody knows except for me…

— Breeze Off the River

By Dan Hagen

This production opens with a Chippendales performance by the agreeable Lars Kristian Hafell — that alone is enough to put the audience in a pretty sunny disposition for the balance of the show.

Imagine Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland saying, “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show — with male strippers!” That’s clearly one source of inspiration for The Full Monty, but the show also swims in darker cultural currents than MGM musicals ever explored.

Corey John Hafner in “The Full Monty.”

Sullivan’s Little Theatre has staged The Full Monty twice before that I know of, always successfully.

Nearly a decade ago, I wrote, “If there’s a 20th century story that captures the dampened spirit of 21st century America in song, it’s probably The Full Monty, the musical now playing at the Little Theatre.

“Based on the 1997 British comedy film, it’s about the psychological ramifications of unemployment, and a regular guy from Buffalo named Jerry who is trying to keep his spirits buoyed in a world that seems determined — with a cold, corporate, industrial-strength efficiency — to grind him right down to a fine powder and scatter him to the four winds.”

Times do change, and that aforementioned American spirit feels even soggier. The men’s seething sense of entitlement to good union jobs seems almost quaint now, two decades on into the cold indifference of the “gig economy,” with its disposable attitude toward labor.

You find yourself thinking that it’s too bad American men’s resulting rage couldn’t actually be bled off into some sexy, self-liberating dance performance. Instead, it gets channeled into the election campaign of Donald Trump.

This production is ably directed and choreographed by Jordan Cyphert, and benefits from the return of musicians in the pit (who went missing for Newsies). A key scene is played in a removable restroom with realistic graffiti on the walls — well done, scenic designer Jonathan Sabo.

John McAvaney is Jerry’s fat, funny and plaintive pal Dave, a role he has played before and can sell with ease. His flat, emphatic delivery of comedy lines is a crowd-pleaser.

Jerry is Trevor Vanderzee, the actor who perfectly embodied Curly in this season’s Oklahoma. Now he no longer expects beautiful mornings, only bleak ones.

Mandy Modic, playing Jerry’s estranged wife Pam, elevates the proceedings another notch with her naturalistic performance, convincingly showing us that she cares deeply about Jerry but is fed up with his self-pity and wants to see him save himself. No lamebrain fairy-tale romance this.

To explore the benefits of killing oneself in song, McAvaney and Vanderzee team up with none other than the Little Theatre’s executive producer, John Stephens. As the prissy, depressed mama’s boy Malcolm, Stephens adopts an amusing and convincing voice completely unlike his own.

The trio’s number, about helpfully crushing a friend’s head with a Big Ass Rock, is always one of my favorites.  With this and Oklahoma, Vanderzee always seems to be singing people into suicide this summer.

The show’s best dance number, Big Black Man, is supplied by Jaimar Brown as Horse. Although he’s credibly aged by makeup, Brown’s limber locomotion betrays his show-stopping youth and stamina.

Kevin Sosamon, playing Jerry’s son Nathan, works that same acting trick in reverse. He’s actually quite young, but seems older because his character is in certain ways more mature than his own father.

I’ve seen Marty Harbaugh many times on the Little Theatre stage, but never better than in this. His awkward, halting attempt at a striptease manages to be both humorous and poignant in the same moment.

Actor Nicholas Carroll, who played Jud Fry so perfectly in Oklahoma, is effective here in the nervously restrained role of Harold, the executive who’s afraid to tell his free-spending wife that he, too, has gotten the proverbial ax. Equity actress Heather J. Beck does a quick star turn as his wife, the brassy belt-it-out lady who somewhat inexplicably adores her Life With Harold.

I see one of my favorite Little Theatre actors, Corey John Hafner, has gone Equity. Congrats. Here, he’s Ethan, a guy who gamely keeps trying to run up walls like Donald O’Connor in Singin' in the Rain and who offers the men’s strip show his, erm, “hidden assets.”

The show reaches its full Glory when … I wonder how many times reviewers have used that pun? But it’s true.

Equity actor Glory Kissel pegs the feel-good meter with her portrayal of the elderly fireball Jeanette Burmeister, a never-say-die Vegas trouper who shows up to rehearse the men. It’s a role she’s played before, always irrepressibly. The audience loses some of the words in her big song, but Kissel dominates all her scenes with her uninhibited, Carol Burnett-like clownishness.

She belts out, “I've played for hoofers who can't hoof. I've played for tone-deaf singers. And once, when I insulted Frank, I played with broken fingers.”

This musical touches on interesting ideas about emasculation and self-worth that it can’t really stop to explore. But it gets points merely for raising them in the context of such audience-alluring salacious fun.

“Never allow yourself to be made a victim,” the playwright Harvey Fierstein once said. “Accept no one’s definition of your life, but define yourself.”

In The Full Monty, Jerry, Dave and the rest of the boys learn just what he meant.

Incidental intelligence:  The Full Monty runs through Aug. 11. For tickets, call The Little Theatre On The Square Box Office at 217-728-7375.

Musical direction is by Kevin Long, with lighting design by Zach Pizza.

The talented cast includes Kate Turner, Brittany Ambler, Bonner Church, Emily Bacino Althaus, Tyler Pirrung and James Garrett Hill.