The Drowsy Chaperone is a meta-musical parody of 1920s musical comedies, where a musical theatre fan, the "Woman in Chair," listens to a record of a fictional 1928 show of the same name. As the music plays, the show comes to life in her apartment, featuring a young Broadway starlet Janet van de Graaff who wants to marry for love, her producer who needs her to stay in show business, her comically inebriated chaperone, a Latin lover, and gangsters. The audience experiences the 1920s musical through the Woman in Chair's commentary and reactions, which include observing its cliched plot, stock characters, and musical numbers, all while learning about the narrator's own melancholic life.