"Will Blunt is in love with Molly, a young transvestite prostitute. But when Blunt rescues him from a life on the streets, he doesn't count on Molly falling in love with Dashwood, the handsome womanizing rake."Young transvestite prostitute?" Sounded perfect for the members of Crossdressers International (CDI) . Having a parental advisory didn't hurt, either. I used our Yahoo group messaging feature to see if anyone was interested in this, and I got a couple nibbles.
Restoration comedy meets modern sex farce in this romantic adventure, exploring the elusive nature of happiness; featuring mistaken identities, duels and double-dealings, gay marriage, and the obligatory sex cave."
Then I got an e-mail from another member, Rita (this was Little Rita, as opposed to Big Rita, who is, let's just say, bigger). Rita's an actor, and she had just been offered tickets to the play for free! Free certainly beats $42 (plus service charges I'm sure). After some more e-mailing there were three of us going to see it.
So Friday afternoon arrived and I went off to the CDI apartment to change. I didn't want to get too dressed up, so I just wore a red Bill Blass sweater with a fringed shawl collar, and a pair of black-on-black paisley slacks. Eventually Rita showed up, and changed into a nice black dress, but Madeline was delayed--she had to go to the theater as a man.
We cabbed down to the theater, where Rita got the tickets from the window, but we had to wait in the lobby until they got the theater open. Then it was upstairs to the Anspacher Stage. Carved out of the original Astor Library main reading room, pillars still intact, it's a surprisingly intimate thrust stage auditorium seating 275, with no one more than eight rows back. But it extends vertically three very tall levels, up to a skylight.
The big name in the cast was Wayne Knight, "Newman" from Seinfeld. There was also Euan Morton, who played Boy George in Taboo, both in London and on Broadway--playing the transvestite here. (Is he getting typecast?)
Things started out with Michael Stuhlbarg, in character as Will Blunt the valet, giving the cellphone/candy wrapper spiel, with an additional warning that there was no intermission, and that he didn't want anyone going out in the middle, then coming back and asking "What did I miss?" He also made some remarks about the late arrivals, reminiscent of the Manager of the Stage at the P.D.Q. Bach concerts.
The actual play started, and it was quite clear the parental advisory for "explicit verse" was quite real--this is a bawdy farce set in 1751, with Restoration-appropriate verse. The characters, with names like Peter Lustforth, Dick Dashwood, Molly Tawdry and Hermione Goode, went about lusting and plotting and masquerading. The big problem was that they kept doing it and doing it and doing it. The novelty of the explicit verse eventually wore off for a lot of the audience. The first act went on for an hour and a half, and after a quick intermission they returned for another 45 minutes. Finally, a Gilbert and Sullivan-worthy ending set everything all right, and everyone lived happily ever after.
Except the audience.
The acting was excellent, the set inventive (scenery kept swinging up from the floor), the costumes beautiful (even the stagehands were appropriately costumed--a couple of the female ones were corseted, pushing up their cleavage far beyond that of any stagehand I've ever encountered). But the play was just too long. As Rita put it in the cab to a nice dinner at East of Eighth, "It needs a re-write--with a pair of scissors."
1 comment:
My GF's theory about plays: "Anything over 90 minutes is too long."
I've been to excellent pieces that were 2 hours, but for the most part, I agree with her.
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