Is He Dead?

***1/2

Lyceum

It's all about Norbert Leo Butz in a dress. In this darling, recently discovered Mark Twain farce about an artist who fakes his own death to drive up his prices, the audience waits patiently for Butz to make his grand begowned entrance and once he does there were guffaws-a-plenty. Like Milton Berle or Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot we have the art of bad drag on display and Butz was milking it to hysterical effect. Adjusting one's package in an enormous post civil war gown? Come on, it's funny! No, there are no shattering revelations in this play- other than the fact that Mark Twain wrote a farce- but it turned out to be a lot of simple fun and it seems like something I can take my suburban Methodist parents to when they visit in February.