** (...out of five stars)The Zipper Theater
With this, her second limited engagement in New York, Miss Richfield 1981 tries out her drag schtick that has made her a local celebrity in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Through musical numbers and mock therapy sessions, this colorful, sassy, loud mouthed, middle aged man in a dress attempts to solve the problems of people yanked onstage from the audience. Though intermittently funny, her improvisations are hit and miss partly due to the fact that they're kinda not improvs at all. She doesn't engage the poor bastards who get pulled up onstage more than she just labels them with fictional "problems" ("You're afraid of clowns!"..."You're afraid of germs!") and then proceeds on to her scripted monologues. This grows tedious after a while and without any sort of dramatic structure or arc, this seems like something that belongs in a bar rather than a theater. Still she does an impressive headstand and she looks very funny in her tacky/slutty dresses and 3 pound cha cha heels. I'd happily toast her at Stonewall.
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