The Fabulous Kane Sisters in Box Office Poison

*** (...out of five stars)

Fringe Festival

Silly silly silly! This madcap old school murder mystery had all the hallmarks of a Charles Busch joint: drag queens dropping one-liners all over the place, scantily clad hot stupid guys, and one million stinky puns, crass innuendos and slutty double entendres. Never mind that most of the 15 characters had no journeys to speak of, or that the plot generally falls apart in the 11th hour, this camp-salad was all about the aforementioned one-liners, hot stupid guys, innuendos, etc.. The packed house was eating this shit up and I couldn't wipe the dumb smile off my face either. The "identical twin" Kane Sisters (made up of the show's two authors Bill Roulet and Mark Geller) were about 40 years apart in age. I have no idea how they were able to pull it off but this dumb joke NEVER got old. Total stupid fun. Favorite line: "I lost my virginity years ago but I still have the box it came in.". Oh! and HGA! HGA! HGA!

Fringe/The Boy in the Basement

Photo/Luke Ratray

Everything depends on context: most people would use a box full of contemporary romance novels for firewood, but not Katharine Heller. She still used those books for fuel, sparking her imagination, but the only thing on fire is her playful, hot, pulp of a tale: The Boy in the Basement. Heller's show plays to a similar crowd as last year's Beebo Brinker Chronicles, but, as an original show, takes itself far less seriously, and is unabashedly fun. When a very hot burglar (Tom Macy) gets caught in the act by four coeds, he finds himself a rather willing sex slave, out to satisfy the needs of a Venezuelan dominatrix (Heller), a holistic hippie (Anna Stumpf), and an "experienced" woman (Lynne Rosenberg). He does that, but in the process, falls for the naive Midwestern virgin (Meghan Powe) who thinks that he's doing yard work as punishment. The side plots, which involve a double-cast Michael Solis, aren't as effective, but Heller's choice to make the narrator, Catherine DuCheval (Nick Fondulis), an excitable guy is clever, and it not only provides a huge boost to the comic atmosphere but helps the show to remain uninhibited as it leaps from scene to scene. On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being "I pictured my mom having sex" and 5 being "I'd come again," The Boy in the Basement gets a 4.5.

Perez Hilton Saves The Universe

Reviewed for Theatermania.

Fringe/Velvet Scratch: Voyage of No Return

Photo/Evangelos Koulouris

The Nightmare Before Christmas's Halloween Town seemed like a "cheerie" place to stay, but the Velvet Town of Velvet Scratch: Voyage of No Return is a dreary deathtrap. Margot (Anastasi Revi), the cackling narrator of these unhappily ever afters, sets up each scene, and her cohorts, Laura Morgan and Alexandra Dyranis-Mounis, enact the gruesome effects. Some of these are derivative, like Edward Gorey hosting The Twilight Zone: a ballet dancer chops off her toes so that her feet will fit into some new slippers; an avid reader breaks her only pair of glasses while trying to reach the beautiful books on the top shelf of the library. But when Revi sticks to the fantastic, the show picks up: a cannibalistic cook transforms her doting sister into a bed and sleeps on her; her sister, so happy to finally be useful to her sister, hugs her . . . to death. The show is unfortunately a mixed bag, more tricks than treats, and the redundancy of Revi's thick foreign accent drag down the light nuances of the pantomime that would show us the beatific beneath all that is bestial. On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being "A very slow death" and 5 being "Dead is the new alive," Velvet Scratch: Voyage of No Return gets a 2.

As You Like It

The problem with mounting a free production of Shakespeare in the Park is that such an unadorned and ambitious job gets largely ignored, even when the company--Boomerang Theatre--is celebrating its 10th anniversary. Case in point, this blog entry, which I'm posting on 10/21. To their credit, the memory of a warm still-summer day brings a lot of positive memories to mind, especially of Jessi Gotta and Christian Toth, who play the man-swaggering Rosalind and the jocularly effete Touchstone to great effect. The overall effect of the play was that of a rowdy, fully energized troupe of actors getting together to have fun--something the folk music from Scott Lee Williams contributed greatly to--and what's most wonderful is how true to Shakespeare this natural, rambling play got from time to time. As You Like It, in particular, is a perfect play to set in the park (along with Midsummer), as it's light and frivolous comedy, the sort where you don't need to hear every word and are free to miss the jokes. As a critic, I couldn't help but think how nice it was to just lie back and enjoy this one.

Fringe/Bound in a Nutshell

For fans of Hamlet, Bound in a Nutshell is an exciting shakeup; for strangers to Shakespeare, it's one of the clearest tellings of this haunted tale, thanks largely to Chris Haas, whose Hamlet is violent yet fluid (like Bill Irwin). The adaptation's conflations and cuts create entirely new conflicts for the cast, and by keeping Hamlet imprisoned on stage throughout the entire show, it refocuses the play on his mental torture, and then juxtaposes it with a new, physical torture. Gregory Wolfe's ingenious staging plays each scene to the hilt: "too too solid flesh would melt" is defiantly delivered to a surveillance camera, so we can watch Claudius (Christopher Yates) and Gertrude (Kathy Keane) react to what is usually secondhand. When Hamlet yells "get thee to a nunnery," his words are unheard and unfelt by Ophelia (Monique Vukovic): she sits helplessly on the other side of a prison visitation cell's solid glass window, begging her lover to pick up the phone. Best of all is the poetic license taken with the imagery: Hamlet, strapped to a chair, being tortured into a confession of madness, sees Ophelia--who has just drowned--walk slowly and silently by. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it's hard to keep from waxing poetic on Moonwork's fantastic production. This is what it means to adapt a play, and on a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being "not to be" and 5 being "wondrous strange," Bound in a Nutshell gets a perfect 5.

[Read on]