David Wilson
What do you get when you cross an ancient comedy with high-school football and gender-bending humor? Hot Greeks.
Thrillpeddlers continues its revival of original Cockettes musicals this week with the more-than-suggestively titled
Hot Greeks. Scrumbly Koldewyn, an original member of the Cockettes, San Francisco's gender-bending theater troupe of the late 1960s and early '70s, joins artistic director Russell Blackwood to restore the original 1972 play, an absurdist adaptation of Aristophanes'
Lysistrata. In the earliest days of satire, Aristophanes railed against the protracted Peloponnesian War in the comedic play by suggesting that the women deny men any sex until they ended the war.
Hot Greeks is loosely based on the play, but it isn't about ending a war. Instead, it's set in the World War II era, and we're thrust into the middle of a college football rivalry. In their quest for victory on the gridiron, the heroes bounce to a 1940s soundtrack as they make their way to the Oracle of Delphi (in this case, "The Hot Twat of Tangier").