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Potato Farmers Ham It Up at the New York Musical Theater Festival -
NYTimes.com
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Enter Singing: Giant Bedbugs, Fancy Boys, Bank Robbers, Potato Farmers
A country traveler sings about his visit to the big city. (“Boise’s just as
noisy as can be.”) A lonely young man forced to wear a wedding dress ends up
with Mr. Right. “Idaho!,” a raunchy “Oklahoma!” spoof set in the supposedly
innocent days of the early 20th century, conveys two big messages in this year’s
New York Musical Theater Festival: Nobody wants to be in 2008 New York.
Everybody is gay.
NYMF is in its fifth year. (To have the acronym pronounced “nymph,”
organizers left out the T for theater.) The festival, which began on Sept. 15
and runs through Sunday, offers small-scale productions of 24 new stage musicals
in relatively out-of-the-way Manhattan theaters (from the West 30s to the West
50s). It’s hard to say whether the themes represent topics close to the
producers’ hearts, or subjects they think will sell, but clearly getting away
from the here and now is a priority.
There are shows set in Depression-era Texas (“Bonnie and Clyde: A Folk
Tale”), early-1990s Silicon Valley (“The Bubble: A Musical Dot-Comedy”), 1920s
Coney Island (“Cyclone and the Pig-Faced Lady”), early-19th-century Switzerland
(“Villa Diodati”), World War II Poland (“To Paint the Earth”), Cuba
(“Castronauts”), Australia (“The Hatpin”) and Israel (“The Jerusalem Syndrome,”
in which tourists turn into biblical characters).
“Bedbugs!!!”
does take place in New York, but distances itself by being set in 2012, a time
when straight women still find it hard to meet nice guys, but gay men can find
new boyfriends around every corner. At least that’s the way the pretty
heroine-villain-victim sees it in this story about six-foot-tall bedbugs that
start eating New Yorkers. The piece is a little bit “Little Shop of Horrors” and
a little bit “Rocky Horror Show,” but even more over the top.
“Play It Cool” takes place in 1950s Hollywood at Mary’s Hideaway, a gay bar
where everyone is afraid of police raids: the lesbian owner; her torch singer
lover; a smooth movie studio executive; and the young aspiring actor, fresh off
the bus from North Carolina, whom the studio guy has just picked up.
If they could see into the future, the characters in “Play It Cool” might be
flabbergasted at the existence of “The Fancy Boys Follies,” a festival entry
with singing, dancing and stripping from a creator of the long-running Off
Broadway hit “Naked Boys Singing.”
Although “Idaho!” does revolve around a heterosexual romance (a hunky potato
farmer and a radiant mail-order bride), it seems to aspire to be the kind of
show that makes gay audiences whoop and holler, because a tough, seemingly
hetero man reveals a secret desire for guys. It’s too bad the show is so
adolescent. Character names like Ida Dunham, Yank Daley and Whip Masters are
among the script’s more subtle efforts at sexual humor.
Even “Bonnie and Clyde: A Folk Tale” has a gay subplot, with J.
Edgar Hoover singing and dancing and eventually showing his supposed true
colors.
Real people are in relatively short supply in this year’s festival, but Fidel
Castro does turn up (in “Castronauts”), as do Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe
Shelley and Mary
Shelley (all in “Villa Diodati”). A highlight of “Bedbugs!!!” is Brian
Charles Rooney’s portrayal of Dionne Salon, an irritating French Canadian singer
with a well-hidden heart.
But the award for the greatest moral and emotional complexity in a character
based on a real person (a living one!) has to go to “She Can’t Believe She Said
That,” a surprising, highly entertaining look at the loves, jobs and talks with
God of Kathie
Lee Gifford. Yes, Kathie Lee Gifford, the alternately loved and maligned
television talk show host. If you’re thinking, “Hasn’t that woman suffered
enough?,” relax. The show sometimes plays rough, but ultimately it
sympathizes.
Heather Laws, playing Ms. Gifford with uncanny similarity (at least in Act
II), goes a long way toward making the show a winner. Ms. Laws played Amy, the
hyper-reluctant bride in the brilliant recent revival of “Company”; here she
gets a chance to shine on her own.
Other notable performers in the shows I saw included Diane Davis as a lovably
life-affirming Bonnie Parker, and Kevin Carolan as a fabulous Hoover in “Bonnie
and Clyde” (Jason Wooten, as Clyde Barrow, is likable but radiates zero danger);
Celina Carvajal as Carly the mad scientist, who goes in for cross-species dating
in “Bedbugs!!!”; Jennifer Perry as wise Aunt Pearlie, Ramona Keller as a black
passing for American Indian and Elena Shaddow as the mail-order bride in
“Idaho!”; and Jane Pfitsch as an idealistic young woman in the Warsaw ghetto and
Robin Skye as her brave mother in “To Paint the Earth.”
“To Paint the Earth” represents something of a rarity in the festival: a
serious musical. It stares unblinkingly at abject fear, abject denial (one
character says she is looking forward to being taken to a lovely place called
Treblinka) and devastating compromise.
Presumably, every production in the festival aspires to be discovered and
whisked away to an Off Broadway engagement or better. The musical “[title of
show],” now in the last days of its Broadway run, was a 2004 NYMF selection. The
intimate, intense “To Paint the Earth,” though, seems more cinematic than
big-stage-worthy.
One show that could hold its own in a transfer, with some tinkering, is
“Bonnie and Clyde.” I’d love to see Hoover’s “Immorality” number on a fancy F.B.I. set in the middle of a big stage.
