The gay-themed lyrics in Dirty Little Showtunes! were written by Tom Orr, who once lived and worked in Seattle with Dan Savage, the columnist, and Showtunes! is just the kind of show Savage would like. In his sex column he's slammed Sling Blade and praised Mission: Impossible (he liked watching Tom Cruise), which hints at the pure and deliberate lack of taste you should bring to this revue. A good sample is Orr's perversion of the "How do you solve a problem like Maria?" song from The Sound of Music into "How Do You Solve Your Problem Gonorrhea?" which features three gay men dressed as nuns. Randy Wendelin is huge, muscle-bound, and funny-looking in a habit; he wags his finger and sings, "Don't let him come inside your mouth/ Not even just a taste." The crowd loved this the night I went. In fact the audience felt like a giddy group of boys who had never been allowed to enjoy their show tunes before. They laughed on cue, whether or not the lines were funny, and they stomped on the floor when something was genuinely good. For a song drawn from "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General" in The Pirates of Penzance, the bald David Bicha wore a gray robe and glasses, posed with a cigarette in a long black filter, and sang, skittishly, "For esoteric sex acts that are highly unconventional/ I am the very model of a modern homosexual," and everyone stomped.
There are a few weak operatic transitions between songs, and a few corny retread gay jokes -- about cowboys, about dropping soap -- but most of the lyrics are funny and sharp, and all the singers are polished professionals. Birdie-Bob Watt does an impressive job with "I'm So Over the Rainbow," a serious critique of gay symbols sung to the famous Wizard of Oz melody in Watt's controlled, reedy-edged voice. (One verse goes: "I think what pink triangles teach got lost/ How do beach towels and key chains link to the Holocaust?") Orr himself performs, and during Act 1 he challenges the audience to offer some parameters for a song -- a melody, a place, a sexual position -- then writes the lyrics at intermission and sings a new song during Act 2. For "sexual position" on the night I went, a drunk woman behind me stood up and spluttered, "Boring missionary position!" which inspired a relatively boring song, but Orr's sheer verve in writing lyrics ad-lib helps keep the show fresh. Most of the second act makes fun of the tension between leather men and drag queens, both within the gay community and within the mind of a single leather man -- Wendelin dresses in a Roman-style leather skirt and sings a number called "Girlie!" (from the musical Purlie), about his own fey tendencies. It's all very tasteless and clever. Orr admits a lifelong secret love for show tunes and calls his revue a satirical "homage," but you don't need a respect for the form to enjoy the performance. For people (like me) who can't stand show tunes, it's fun to watch them get skewered by Orr's dirty mind.
-- Michael Scott Moore
Menage a Dog
Sylvia. By A.R. Gurney. Directed by John Rando. Starring Kelly Waymire and William Anton. At the Marines Memorial Theater, 609 Sutter (at Mason), through Aug. 31. Call 771-6900.
A man finds a dog. An adorable bitch, to be precise. He brings her home and falls in love. His wife isn't pleased. She consults a marriage counselor, who first informs her that it's a midlife-crisis thing and then asks just how intimate the two, er, companions are. The wife at first dismisses this innuendo, but then stumbles: "Well, there's a lot of petting ... licking ... and stroking." The audience giggles.
Ah, the charms of the bestial love triangle.
Many a savvy theatergoer will ignore the ads for Sylvia, with the dot over the "i" a darling little paw print. They will assume that a Theater Row comedy featuring a lovable doggie can't really satisfy their yen for cutting-edge drama or surprising social commentary. But A.R. Gurney has achieved a bizarre feat in his play about cross-species love: It is at once wholesome and entirely depraved, giddy and sublime. Like the screwball comedies of the 1930s, in which stylistic lightness allowed writers to tread deep into taboo territory, Sylvia takes on the perverse and prevailing affairs of the heart that afflict many a married man (and woman). It also speaks to the profound empathic bonds between animals and humans that both mirror the lure of deviant gender, race, and generational relations and at the same time transcend them.
When Sylvia (played by the irresistibly emotive Kelly Waymire) grovels at the feet of her new master, she smells his shoes and gushes, "I even love you when you hit me!" Suddenly a story about a guy and his dog turns into an S/M scene between an older man and his cute blond love slave. Such unnerving and stimulating double meanings bore holes into the play's gentle mainstream facade. When Greg, the middle-aged professional, struggles to express his newfound passion to his suspicious wife, he croons: "I have a need. If I could put it into words, it wouldn't be a need. I really want her, Kate."
As if domination weren't metaphor enough, Gurney gets kinkier. "Dogs are like children," muses the philosophical-minded Tom (and owner of Bowser), whom Greg and Sylvia often meet at the park. Greg expounds on Sylvia's "cute little butt" and "multicultural heritage," and the image of the exotic, submissive younger woman morphs into one of father-daughter incest. When Bowser deflowers Sylvia behind a bush, Tom cheers his "son" on. Greg becomes apoplectic with jealousy as Bowser gets a little of what Greg would really like. "He raped her!" he cries.
Director John Rando -- who brought the play to S.F. after a successful run at the Old Globe in San Diego -- has staged the deviant proceedings with only the thinnest film of irony. William Anton as the pup-struck Greg embraces the role with untempered conviction, tossing off the oddest of lines with Leave It to Beaver earnestness. Dan Hiatt, in multiple roles as Tom, Kate's friend Phyllis, and sexually ambiguous therapist Leslie, deftly toys with his audience in a dance of subtle and unseemly nuances. Only British-born Jane Carr strikes a hollow note -- struggling vocally with her New York accent and interpreting the role of the schoolteacher wife with the subtlety of a Monty Python drag skit.
The end of this peculiar play triggers the most confounding realization: Perhaps unknowingly, Gurney has written a remarkably liberating female role. Waymire's inventive, electric Sylvia stubbornly retains her doglike essence in the face of Greg's relentless and unsettling projections. She follows her instincts of loyalty, lust, anger, clarity of purpose, and rambunctiousness. Bereft of the female burdens of self-consciousness, she offers a glimpse into a life free from gender's absurd constraints.
-- Carol Lloyd
Shaw's Wicked Smile
Mrs. Warren's Profession. By George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Richard Seyd. Starring Maura Vincent, Concetta Tomei, and Charles Lanyer. At the Geary Theater, 415 Geary (at Mason), through July 13. Call 749-2228.
Toward the end of the ACT's production of Mrs. Warren's Profession the scene has to change quickly from a sunlit country garden to a sober London office in Chancery Lane. Miss Vivie Warren has just met her mother for the first time and is shocked to learn a number of things: that Mrs. Warren is a madam, that her own education at Cambridge was paid for by a European network of brothels, and that the man she was ready to fall for, Frank Gardner, is probably her half-brother. She's disgusted and decides to live for herself in London, giving up on romance and rejecting her mother. It's a happy ending, in George Bernard Shaw's world. But the shift from the country to Chancery Lane uses a storm (blowing bikes and parasols like the tornado in The Wizard of Oz) and a howling locomotive to distract from the green turf and trellised cottage twirling offstage. The switch is exciting but disruptive. On opening night, the audience was rapt right up to this expensive and goofy special effect, but after that everything dragged.
It's hard to say whose fault this is. It could be Shaw's, since he tells his story using almost three solid hours of witty conversation and very little drama; maybe by the end all the talk just wears. It could be Concetta Tomei's, who seems to lose her focus on Mrs. Warren in the final act and lapses into a grating, repetitive voice. But Tomei has excellent control otherwise, and for the first three acts (there're four total) the unraveling story of her past is involving and well-performed. Maura Vincent plays Vivie with a light, understated touch that makes her the most human character in the play, and a nighttime scene in the country garden that shows her learning about lower-class life in her mother's day -- when absurd wages and lethal factory conditions regularly drove women to streetwalking -- is very powerful. It's a dark interlude between two blithe daytime scenes of courtship and witty banter. Vivie spends those scenes resisting the young Frank Gardner, who woos her with love, and the old George Crofts, who tries to lure her with money; and the story moves nicely up to a gunpoint face-off between the two men. Raye Birk plays Crofts as a compellingly wily capitalist snake, and Matthew Boston, after he warms up, is an entertaining Gardner, a smarmy little British no-'count. While they make fools of themselves over Vivie you can almost see Shaw's wicked smile behind the stage -- the satire, the timing, is beautifully done.
But then the scenery shifts. The locomotive noise and jets of steam feel almost like a joke, as if director Richard Seyd thought he could make an elaborate logistical problem fun by masking it in mock-Victorian trappings worthy of My Fair Lady. The result is good for the set -- the oak-paneled office looks more engaging than the sterile country yard -- but not so good for the play. For whatever reason, and I think the set change helps shatter the spell, the act showing Vivie's determination to lead her own life in London has less vitality than the others, and feels like a forced coda to an otherwise spirited show.
-- Michael Scott Moore
Drama Class
Eisenhower Hour. Written and directed by Rich Baker. Starring Libby O'Connell, Robert G. Kennedy, Greg Lucey, Lisa Monahan, and Erin-Kate Whitcomb. At the Cable Car Theater, 430 Mason (at Post), through Aug. 3. Call 956-8497.
The dorky crossing guard, wearing cuffed high-waters and directing traffic on Mason Street with a little red stop sign, offers the first clue that this new comedy is interactive. "You be careful!" he shouts at a couple dashing across the street against the light; looking back in confusion, they are nearly mowed down by oncoming cars. Onlookers exchange amused glances. It's more of the same inside the theater, where a 1950s high school assembly is about to take place. A Miss Porter, taking tickets at the theater's entrance, greets an inquiry about the bathroom by filling out a bathroom pass. "Homeroom teacher?" she barks. Startled silence. She lowers her horn-rimmed glasses. "Are you new here?" she asks. Vigorous nodding. "OK, then," she replies primly, tearing the pass from her notepad, "never mind." Before the assembly begins, a hood with a greasy DA materializes from behind a seat. He introduces himself as Bud and proffers a fifth of Jack Daniel's. "Drink?" he asks with a conspiratorial grin.
We are thus integrated into the student body at Roosevelt Jefferson Technical High, where the bespectacled and tongue-tied Principal Bollus (Greg Lucey) has called an assembly to show us training films demonstrating proper deportment in social situations. He is joined by Coach Edwards (Robert G. Kennedy), a bothersome clown to Bollus' bumbling straight man. The movies (based on late-'40s and early-'50s instructional films created by Coronet and Encyclopedia Brittanica) turn out to be a series of theatrical vignettes in which the eight cast members, aided by rapid costume and set changes, play several different roles in scenes like "What to Do on a Date," "Shy Guy," and "Are You Popular?" Between vignettes, Bollus and Edwards dodge spitballs and subdue hecklers as they make announcements.
Once the vignettes begin, the interactivity essentially ends, although this kind of show rewards a cheerful audience that doesn't mind playing along; viewers who arrive grumpy might do well to accept Bud's offer of a surreptitious slug from the bottle. (Bud is played by David Berkson, a San Francisco Shakespeare Festival veteran.) Eisenhower Hour, the latest from the creators of Quiz Bang, a Gayme Show, plays an awful lot like, well, a high school production, performed by an exceptionally clever thespian club. Some bits lose their effervescence and go as flat as warm Coca-Cola, particularly the lackluster ending, but most of this is amusing, if lightweight, entertainment.
The troupe takes predictably corny scenarios and skews them with passing references to the Cold War, school busing, the good girl/bad girl dynamic, and the McCarthy era. Satirizing the '50s is in one sense unnecessary: A lot of viewers under a certain age already find it laughable that people tried to hide behind such transparently false wholesomeness. Fortunately, what the script lacks in ambition the cast makes up for with considerable talent and enthusiasm. There are flashes of physical comedy brilliance, particularly from Erin-Kate Whitcomb as a maniacally zealous high school cheerleader and as a girl helping her big sister get ready for a date in a scene Whitcomb steals with a wonderfully insane performance. Slow-motion and stop-motion sequences with a narrator's voice-over are funny and effective. Rich Baker could spend a little more time on his writing and direction homework; that said, the show's squeaky-clean good fun merits a solid B.
-- Heather Wisner
Out of Dodge
Muddy Little River. Written and directed by Harriet Dodge. Starring Dodge, Kyle Sheldon, Eric Dekker, and Tanya Uhlmann. At Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia (at 16th Street), Call 626-3311.
The ads for Harriet Dodge's brief engagement of Muddy Little River at Intersection for the Arts called the show "post-modern musical theater from the land of cornfields, Camaros, press-board paneling, and the Ronco glass-cutter" -- meaning, not just the Midwest, but also a place and time so unfashionable it's now hip among lesbians. Dodge's character was a masculine-looking woman, Jimmy, who had managed to join the Navy as a man. Jimmy had a self-conscious Midwestern-boy swagger, a Rolling Stones belt buckle, and a fringe of hair at the end of his chin. (Dodge is a co-founder of the Bearded Lady coffee shop on 14th Street.) The show was an extended monologue by Jimmy about a joy ride he took after his girlfriend's suicide. Projected slides and found footage of old American cars on glaring late-'60s back roads set the mood; so did a live banjo-flavored score by Alicia McCarthy, Shanna Banana, and someone called "Prairie Dog."
But the story was cut up by music, dance routines, and a beautifully manic interlude involving sledgehammers, which made it hard to follow. Stripped of its tangents it would have been a simple yarn about grief and new love, but it wouldn't have been a) postmodern, or b) nearly as much fun. The best dance interlude was a duet that Dodge called the "Dream-Come-True Dance," with Kyle Sheldon and Tanya Uhlmann weaving under blue light to a sleepy tune that sampled slowed-down passages of Led Zeppelin's "Black Dog." The next duet, involving fuzzy slippers, was a little peremptory and not as strong. To me, none of the interruptions had a clear and obvious connection to Jimmy's tale; but a Beatles song, "Cry Baby Cry" -- sung huskily by Asia D. Sage from behind a red-lit fence -- was a beautiful moment on opening night, and afterward Dodge came on as Jimmy's uninhibited alter-ego, in Jackie O sunglasses and a horrible white and brown dress, passing sledgehammers into the audience for no obvious reason and spouting a theory about God and shit, cosmic justice, and Journey. With wit and raw energy she turned what could have been a pretentious rant into the show's highlight, and then started a dance to "Lovin', Touchin', Squeezin' " that climaxed in the total destruction of a wooden chair.
On canvas River would have been a cluttered modern painting, with trinkets glued on in piles. It wasn't smooth and stirring drama, but it told a coherent story; and when Dodge got away from a faux-earnest voice her performance as Jimmy was intimate, involving, and sly. "Muddy Little River, that's me," Jimmy said. "Can't see shit, can't see the bottom, all I can do is keep on keepin' on." Even if the play sometimes felt self-consciously muddy, Dodge put in the time and intelligence to keep things swift-moving and fun.
-- Michael Scott Moore
