Dining Chicago

Delicious dresses and sweet singers, but little of substance in Northlight Theatre’s “The Marvelous Wonderettes”: from left, Dina DiCostanzo, Laura Taylor, Cat Davis and Tempe Thomas. (Photo by Michael Brosilow.)

During hard times, people seek the warmth of the well-known, the solace of childhood memory. In dining, that means comfort food (perhaps explaining local food media’s recent burger fixation. The stage equivalent — comfort theater, if you will — arises in low-risk revivals and shows that look back at happier days.

So, the Goodman Theatre is giving us “Animal Crackers,” a revival of a 1928 Marx Brothers comedy, a show that saw successful revivals in Washington, London and elsewhere in the ’80s and ’90s, and Northlight Theatre offers “The Marvelous Wonderettes,” a jukebox musical stuffed with 1950s and ’60s bubblegum pop, which has been packing them in off-Broadway for the past year.

“Animal Crackers today remains an extraordinary antidote for the times we live in,” says its director, Henry Wishcamper.

“I wanted to take people back to a time when our hopes and dreams were wide-eyed and just a little bit simpler,” says Roger Bean, creator and director of “Wonderettes.”

Neither show has much of a plot. With book by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind and score by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, “Animal Crackers” recreates a farcical Roaring Twenties society party, mostly as a background for Marxist clowning. “The Wonderettes” presents a foursome of girl singers, bickering between performing at their high-school prom, a distaff version of “Forever Plaid” with an even thinner fictional veneer.

It’s hard for me to know how either of these shows might appear to young audiences who never saw the Marx Brothers movies or heard the top-40 tunes. Although my own acquaintance comes from late-night TV and oldies radio, I still viewed these plays through a nostalgic lens.

Joey Slotnick ably resurrects Groucho Marx in the Goodman Theatre’ “Animal Crackers.” (Photo by Eric Y. Exit.)

At times, that was problematic. Joey Slotnick, who plays Groucho Marx playing honored party guest Capt. Jeffrey T. Spaulding, has Groucho’s shtick down perfectly, complete with some fine ad-libs, but so many of the jokes and gestures are so familiar that it’s hard to shake the feeling you’re watching an imitation — even though it’s an excellent imitation.

Jonathan Brody does an equally good job mirroring Chico as Emmanuel Ravelli. Ora Jones as Mrs. Rittenhouse effectively channels longtime Marx foil Margaret Dumont, adding some amazing physical stunts. Harpo as The Professor makes something of a change, since the role is played by a woman, Molly Brennan, but that only adds to the imitative quality. This gender bending, I gather, is because of one significant change from the original, a sign of our present straitened times: Wishcamper has pared down the cast to just nine actors, who play 14 named roles as well as assorted bit parts and extras. They all do it seamlessly, yet even with the orchestra filling things out across center stage, the set sometimes seemed awfully empty.

Would the show work at all without the Marx tropes? I don’t know. The musical wasn’t revived for more than 50 years after the brothers left Broadway because nobody thought so. Fresh parts of the show include Tony Yazbeck and Mara Davi, as one set of lovers, in a duet-and-dance sequence, “Three Little Words,” and the orchestra really showing its stuff in “The Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me” sung by Jessie Mueller and Davi. Neither song appeared in the 1928 original.

Of course, the comedy is the thing. Maybe I didn’t laugh at the jokes in “Animal Crackers” as hard as I did the first time I heard them, but I still laughed. If we can’t have the real Marx Brothers, the Goodman’s version is two and a half hours of first-quality ersatz.

“The Marvelous Wonderettes” re-creates a vanished era equally well. Dressed in wide-skirted pastels Cat Davis, Dina DiCostanzo, Laura E. Taylor and Tempe Thomas give full and adorable measure to the hit parade of sweet and bubbly numbers that pack this show. Too sweet. About 15 minutes into Act I, after “Lollipop” and midway through “Sugartime,” I was already finding it cloying.

With 33 numbers in an hour and three quarters, the foursome doesn’t do much but sing. They do it very well. Yet such storyline as there is turns these talented girls into bubbleheads who measure their lives strictly by their relations to boys. Things don’t improve any when they return, clad like caucasian Supremes in chiffon and feathers, for their 10-year reunion in Act II. They’re older and sadder but still clinging to the men who done them wrong.

While the tunes drive the message, lovesick songs like “Stupid Cupid,” “Dream Lover,” “It’s My Party” and “Rescue Me,” weren’t all there was to pop music of the period. Where’s Elvis? Chuck Berry? The Beatles? The Kingston Trio? Even if you stick to girl-group hits, what about songs like “South Street” (The Orlons) and “Dancing in the Street” (Martha and the Vandellas)?

Opening night at Northlight was full of people who went to proms in the 1950s and earlier. Those who grew up with this music were clearly into it — during intermission, when recorded music of the same era played, I saw one balding senior citizen doing the watusi. Yet for all that, the applause at show’s end was temperate.

The clothes were great, and the tunes were bouncy, but the bubblegum world isn’t one most of us want to live in today.