Die Mommie Die!

photo: Carol Rosegg

Charles Busch is back in wigs and heels to treat New York to one of his smart and snappy campfests, and while this one (set in the late '60's and spoofing Hollywood Gothic melodramas) is a little too loose to snap as tightly as his very best, he's at the height of his dizzying powers as a performer. Every cross of his leg and tilt of his head is an orgasm of kitsch pleasure, even for those in the audience who don't recognize Busch's style as a dead-on exaggeration of the feminine signifiers from vintage Hollywood melodramas. In this one, as a faded femme fatale and washed-up chanteuse who plots to murder her louse of a movie producer husband, Busch gives himself plenty of scenery to chew. Some of his supporting castmates do a bit too much chomping of their own, but it hardly matters in the end: Die Mommie Die! is still one of the funnest nights out you can have at the theatre right now.

Also blogged by: [David]

A Glance at New York

Photo/Dixie Sheridan

I'd certainly be woozy and out of breath if I had to get up on stage and perform under the tight, hyperactive confines of Benjamin Baker's 1848 hit, A Glance at New York. There's no way I'd be able to play two characters -- sometimes at once -- as Randy Sharp demands of her cast. I'd be more lost than George Parsells (Ian Tooley), the country rube who keeps getting swindled in the city, or confused by the local, colorful slang. However, to be fair, most of the cast seemed to be tripping over their lines, or half-heartedly moving together, and both the visual pictures and text seemed clumsy. Reviving the vaudeville comedy does indeed give us a glimpse of New York, a place so much chaotic and faster-paced than it is today that it's almost a foreign country. It lets us hear the old, sorrowful tunes of that era (as sung by Britt Genelin and Laurie Kilmartin): so what if the songs, like the cuts in scene, come out of the blue? The show explodes onto the stage, and ebbs away just as quickly 50 minutes later, and such oceanic theater isn't concerned with narrative so much as a theatrical flood of ideas and images. To its end, A Glance at New York succeeds in that, but without any sort of anchor, the production is a bit of a wash.

[Also blogged by: David]

The Blood Brothers Present: PULP

photo: Aaron Epstein

A Halloween goodie-bag of three one-acts and several short vignettes, Pulp is a razor-spiked treat for horror and gore fans. The tastiest bits in the mix - Mac Rogers' Best Served Cold and James Comtois' Listening To Reason - were adapted from 1950's horror comics: thanks in part to smart costuming, resourceful staging, and heightened performances (but mostly thanks to sharp writing) they both achieve the feeling of the era's comic books come to pulpy, blood-soaked life. (They also both feature macabre narration, which goes a long way toward unifying the 90-minute evening's plays with the shorter pieces). The third play, Qui Nguyen's Dead Things Kill Nicely, doesn't recall the era in the same way as the other one-acts, but its Evil Dead-like detour into more baldly comic territory adds another welcome flavor of tainted candy to the assortment. Just about every piece in Pulp - from the wickedly smart vignette that opens the show (in which a metaphor between the relationship of artist to audience and of doctor to patient is illustrated with a most unpleasant "surgery") to the chilling one that closes it (no, I won't say a thing about that one, except that it's not easy to shake off) ends in a splatter-fest. Hard as you try to keep your tongue in your cheek, you'll have a bloody good nightmare anyhow.

The Blood Brothers Present: Pulp

Pulp, a new horror anthology by Nosedive Productions, isn't just right for the October season, it's exactly what the doctor ordered. According to that eviscerating doctor of the opening number, "Metaphor," some pain is necessary to satisfy the audience's desire for catharsis, but this well-assembled production is pretty good about cauterizing the weaker portions and the evening is mostly a delightfully grim success. As hosts and stylistic centers for the show, the Blood Brothers (Pete Boisvert and Patrick Shearer) are a delight, shuffling across the stage in slick, funereal suits, all skeleton-bald with faces as white as the gleam in their sinister smirks. The pieces with Shearer glibly narrating go over best, namely James Comtois's "Listening to Reason" and Mac Rogers's "Best Served Cold." The evil narrator lends a brisk pace to the pulp, allowing us to revel in the splattering blood packets and to laugh along with him and his delight in schadenfreude. But the entire evening, even amid some poor acting in Qui Nguyen's "Dead Things Kill Nicely," captures the right mood, and the Nosedive company's collaborative efforts really pay off: this Pulp goes down smooth.

[Read on] [Also blogged by: Patrick]

The Ritz

There are towel-clad hotties prowling the three-tiered cherry red bathhouse for sex, but we only get to glimpse them: the gay men we spend time with in Terrence McNally's The Ritz are sexless cartoons, strategically safe for the straight audiences of yesteryear. This comedy probably provided a whiff of naughtiness when it premiered over thirty years ago, before the AIDS pandemic shut down the city's bathhouses and before Generation XXX absorbed gays into mainstream culture. Now, minus any kind of dirty kick, it's just a flimsy farce that plays like a bad Abbott and Costello movie: it's busy, but it's rarely funny. Joe Mantello's direction doesn't help; he keeps the doors slamming and the bodies moving but he doesn't guide the actors to the high-stakes performances that are needed to drive a farce. Kevin Chamberlain gets high marks for his fresh take on his character, and Brooks Ashmanskas manages to bring some dignity to the thankless stereotype he's asked to play, but the one performance that completely triumphs is given by Rosie Perez. As Googie, a washed up lounge performer with more determination than talent, Perez is riotously on-target and turns Googie's lousy and overambitious bathhouse act into the highlight of The Ritz.

Also blogged by: [Aaron] [David]

Scarcity

Photo/Doug Hamilton

Scarcity is a thuggish play, with loose scenes shuffled over by the violence (implied or not) of a raised fist. There are moments of great strength in Lucy Thurber's script, as when the perpetually drunk patriarch, Herb (the excellent Michael T. Weiss), asks if he's ever hurt his daughter, or whenever his struggling but strong wife, Martha (the fiery Kristen Johnston), tries to keep up the lie. Their relationship is believably intense, and we can see how such a routine would affect its two children, Rachel and Billy. I'll be the meanie though, and say that this is where the play falls apart: the young actress playing Rachel (Meredith Brandt) is awful, and although Jackson Gay can have her pace around the kitchen, implying that it's a prison and that her father really has molested her, her lengthy scenes don't seem precociously chilling, they seem planned. Billy (Brandon Espinoza) is more believable, wound so tightly that he can finally look at his father without flinching. While his romantic entanglement with his teacher (Maggie Kiley) is also bold and explosive, there's little explanation for why she, who seems to have suffered so little, desires the sort of life on display in Scarcity. The show comes across as essentially true, but exaggeratedly so, particularly with the final subplot, which always looks like it's being played for easy (albeit uncomfortable) laughs. Martha survives by mentally prostituting herself to her cousin, Louie (Todd Weeks); in exchange for the food and bills her husband can't provide, she leads love-struck Louie on, letting him think he's a part of the family, though it's obvious everyone (including his own wife, Gloria) despises him. That's a play in of itself, but as with so much in Scarcity, it's lost in the violence.

[Also blogged by: Patrick | David]