Tupperware: An American Musical Fable

IT’S MY PARTY The cast hawks its wares.

Musical-theater detractors might balk at word that Hairspray’s storefront cousin has just arrived, decked out with a chorus of cloistered housewives, a faux product-placement motif and a winking drag performance. But this production features wit and talent sharp enough to more than win over even the most showtune-skeptical.

Tupperware—the true tale of a Florida widow enlisted to hawk plastics to her neighbors—exhibits the irresistible trappings of any big-box musical. Its creators, the team behind 2007’s far-quirkier Love Is Dead, have skillfully tapped into the formula of catchy tunes plus wacko characters that makes such shows damn near irresistible, like the supporting threesome of flighty housewives—the goofy gaggle of chorus girls from South Pacific with a dash of acid acuity.

The barebones aesthetic occasionally verges on incongruous. Tupperware unfolds, after all, in the superficially opulent world of the midcentury middle-class. But Nathan Rohrer’s beautifully wrought pastel wardrobe, cartoonishly tailored to match each character’s ethos, welcomes us warmly into the McCarthy era. Tupperware never opts for the obsessively self-referential campiness that fetters so many contemporary musicals. Even the resident villainess-in-drag, for example (Danny Taylor in becoming Cruella de Vil getup), rarely milks the outfit for laughs. This gender subversion—as gorgeously sung as it is richly scribed—isn’t great camp. It’s merely great.

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