Expectation is the best friend of disappointment, and I would have been better served to check the former at the door. I thought, how can this be anything but awesome, with vaudeville influences, an opera trained singer doing jazz songs, all at the Revue stage? Although this play had its share of charms, ultimately I had a hard time with it.

Bremner Duthie plays The Chaser at a time when the last vaudeville theatre in America is being shut down. Very quickly in the show, he introduces the sage life advice of his long-past partner, Sally: “frivolity is the human...