boy culture

What A Day To Be Gay In The Sea!

One of those gays!

We had tickets to City Center’s limited-run Encores! show No, No, Nanette! for tonight; we got them even before we had the idea of getting two puppies, or we might have thought twice. I mean, they would be alone for quite a while. So I dashed home twice to exhaust them and shower them with puppy treats for the long haul, and met José at the theater. Let me tell you something—No, No Nanette! is the equivalent of puppy treats for rich, old broads. I saw canes, walkers, wheelchairs and gurneys filled with classy carcasses sporting giant-framed glasses and tasteful bobs. More plastic surgery than the cast of Desperate Housewives. Oh, and Polly Bergen and Fran Drescher (complete with parents and gay-seeming ex-husband) showed, too.

The show has gotten raves. It grew on me (the first couple of songs are so stupid and forgettable I was rolling my eyes hard) as a good example of how—if not why—to stage a period show with style and energy. The star is Sandy Duncan, in a role that brought Ruby Keeler out of a four-decade retirement in 1971, but both Beth Leaven as her frenemy and the titular Nanette (Mara Davi) probably have meatier roles in this frothy romp about a young girl tired of hearing “no” and the Three’s Company-style shenanigans encompassing her aunt, uncle and pretty much everyone else in the vicinity.

Still, there was something heartwarming about seeing Sandy Duncan, a familiar face absent for a while, doing two elaborate tap-dancing, high-kicking routines at the age of 62!

Equally winning was Rosie O’Donnell as wise-cracking maid Pauline. She gets the best one-liners and delivers them with far better comedic timing that she seems to have at her disposal if you judge her based on her stand-up act. And when she emerges toward the end and performs a nifty tap routine, it nearly brought the house down. What a pleasant surprise! I’d gotten tickets in case she wound up being a spectacle and she turned out to be spectacular.

The show is a little creaky, but if done this energetically works fine. There were several phrases that sounded surprisingly more modern, making me wonder if they’d been inspired by the show—Michael Berresse as Billy Early exclaiming, “Get busy!” comes to mind.

I can’t say this would be a Broadway smash, but a lot of work obviously went into it, and if Thoroughly Modern Millie could soar, why not this? (Just go from two intermissions to one, please.)

Before the show, Patti LuPone gave an award to Douglas S. Cramer, whose name you’ll recognize from schlocky TV shows (Love Boat, Dynasty, you name it) yet whose real passion has always been the stage. I found the story created by her speech and his acceptance more interesting than the show itself—a gay man who makes multi-millions in bad TV only to spend all his free time sponsoring the revitalization of classic Broadway scores. Plus he’s ancient and openly gay, all the more inspiring.

A Dream Within A Dream

While in Vegas, there is a handful of things to do, many of which I don’t currently do, never did or am not allowed to do. I play slots to exce$$ and I can be counted on to stroll through shopping areas, but that’s it. Las Vegas is not exactly our cultural mecca, but we had a free night so we booked tickets for La Rêve at the Wynn.

I’m so glad we saw this show because it was totally captivating. It’s an astonishing acrobatic show with a water theme, but this doesn’t begin to sum up the daring feats accomplished—people are hauled up out of sight only to plummet straight down several stories into a pool, are hoisted into the air where they cling to each other using only their legs and pile on top of each other in ways that would crush me and that look graceful for them.

The men are incredible, though spookily all shaved to look identical

One highlight had two men balanced at the shoulders (first video). It was gasp-inducing.

Plot-wise, this was more an impressionistic piece than a true story. I saw it as a collection of dream fragments, the only ineffective part being the broadly comic men who reminded me of Roberto Benigni and seemed designed to appease any poor schlumps who’d been dragged in by the wife.

Mainly, sitting back and watching the gravity-taunting feats was alternately eerily calming and momentous, like when you see the mother ship in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.

My video is even more piecemeal than the show’s structure, so just use that for a taste and promise me you’ll give it a try if you hit Vegas.

I don’t know what they pay those guys, but it’s worth it.

Sob Story

Tears & clowning.

After having seen a brief, no-frills press run-through of a few numbers from Cry-Baby: The Musical, I was sufficiently interested in seeing how the whole thing would come together. With creative contributions by Mark O’Donnell & Thomas Meehan (book), David Javerbaum & Adam Schlesinger (songs), choreographer Rob Ashford and director Mark Brokaw—not to mention consultation by the near-cult, near-classic film’s near-legendary director, John Waters—Cry-Baby turns out to be a spirited hodge-podge of sparkling and dull performances, memorable and forgettable songs and truly spectacular dancing, all tenuously held together by one thing the ‘50s music it offers had in spades (spunk) and one thing it didn’t have at all (irony).

Scanning a few fan boards, you might think Cry-Baby was a disaster-in-the-making, that its backers might be in tears over its prospects. Some Broadway fans, posting over and over to create the impression of a quorum, have speculated that the show is terrible, that it’s destined to fail, or even that it will close before opening. I’m not a Broadway expert, but based on the preview I saw (it opens April 24), I would be a little surprised if the show didn’t at least make a go of it—it’s got much to recommend it even if it can’t quite live up to Hairspray. (Something that could definitely be said of the films both were based on, as well.)

***READ ON for my review, or win tickets at HunkDuJour and make up your own mind.***

The infected.

The musical follows the seemingly cursed existence of charming bad boy Wade “Cry-Baby” Walker (James Snyder), a Baltimore “drape” (hood) with a giant chip on his shoulder thanks to the unjust execution of his parents for allegedly being Communists. Ever since they went to the chair, his tear ducts have been dry in protest.

Cry-Baby makes the mistake of falling for ultimate “square,” Allison Vernon-Williams (Elizabeth Stanley), a Sandra Dee type who longs to be bad, but whose uptight grandmother (Harriet Harris) and obnoxious prepster boyfriend Baldwin (Christopher J. Hanke) disapprove. Cry-Baby’s motley crew of tag-alongs—the aptly named “Hatchet-Face” (Courtney Balan), slutty Wanda (Lacey Kohl), his crass, preggo sister Pepper (Carly Jibson) and black (that’s all it took in the ‘50s) Dupree (Chester Gregory II)—aren’t much help in winning them over.

The plot is, if anything, simplified from the already unadorned film—it’s a series of encounters during which good (Allison) meets bad (Cry-Baby) with hopes of rubbing off on each other while attempting to resist resistance from the powers that be. If anyone in the audience doesn’t expect true love to prevail, they’re really new to this whole entertainment thing.

What I liked about Cry-Baby, I loved.

Beulah, Peel Me A Drape

I had the pleasure of being invited to a press run-through of some songs from the forthcoming Broadway musical Cry-Baby that had a successful out-of-town run in La Jolla—and the big bonus was that John Waters attended. When I was a teenager, I discovered Pink Flamingos and Polyester on VHS at my local video store and thought I was the most avant-garde thing to ever hit Flushing, Michigan, for liking and getting these fucked-up flicks. In college, I ran to see Hairspray when it opened, and it became my favorite of his films, even if it bore so little resemblance to the rest of his "ew!"-vre.

Waters, waiting in the wings to begin Cry-Baby's press presentation.

Oh, What Heights We'll Hit

In the Heights comes to Broadway after a critically-acclaimed off-Broadway run in which it was compared to classics like Rent. Having heard this, I expected an edgy look at life in Washington Heights. While it has much to offer, In the Heights is nothing like Rent—people had gender issues, money issues and HIV in Rent, while the characters in this show have nothing worse going on in their lives than what you might find in garden-variety sitcom.

Conceived and written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show follows the life of Usnavi (Miranda himself), a shop owner aided by his baby-lothario Sonny (Robin DeJesus) and deeply connected to his loving grandmother Abuela Claudia (Olga Merediz). Usnavi is falling in love with Vanessa (Karen Olivo), a bewitching around-the-way girl.

Hold Your Applause

A bumpy night.

I was so annoyed when I waited too long to get tickets to Applause at New York City Center with Christine Ebersole until the last second, winding up with lousy seats in the front (upper, upper) gallery. As it turns out, the show turned out to be the sound of one hand clapping—and instead of regretting waiting too long, I regret not having waited a bit longer.

Applause is a 1970 musical based on All About Eve, one of the greatest movies ever made. Except it's less a musical than a star vehicle, one created for Lauren Bacall. If you don't think the show is weak musically, take note that the singing-challenged Bacall nonetheless nabbed a Tony for the role. It wasn't for her warbling, it was for her Bacallness.

Margo Channing is a legend of the stage and screen (and of coffee commercials), too jaded to truly appreciate her lofty position, to be as good as she once was or to recognize that her lover Bill Sampson (Michael Park) is more important to her than play-acting. Her undoing is that she is also too caught up in herself to see that a starstruck fan-turned-personal assistant named Eve Harrington (Erin Davie, who's not so much channeling as sending up Anne Baxter) would gladly take all of it off her hands.

Applause is a treasure...I think I'll bury it.

With comic relief provided by her hairdresser Duane Fox (a listless Mario Cantone, who for once in his life really needed to amp it up to Mario Cantone heights) and moral support from misguided friends Karen Richards (a bland Kate Burton) and her playwright husband Buzz (Chip Zien, who's game enough), Margo will slowly come to grips with the fact that Eve's flattery has gotten her everywhere, and will leave Margo with nowhere to turn.

Bye, bye, Birdie—hello, Mario.

If only it weren't set to (this) music.

I had thought Ebersole would be a great diva for the role of Margo Channing, but while she displayed her beautiful range in a couple of the show's more tolerable songs, she's basically miscast. She has all the Broadway star power required but very little of the edge that fans of the movie would hope for. It's not all her fault—as written, the show is filled with fluffy love songs and a paper-thin book that conspire to make this Margo a forgettable push-over lacking spirit, danger...Bacallness.

I'll say this for her—Bette Davis was only 41 when she shot All About Eve, and Ebersole is 55, yet I could not help thinking she was too soft, too youthful for the part. She looks gorgeous and seemed to be her own light source. She looks as young as Park. She looks younger than Davis ever did.

Still, ya know a show based on All About Eve is going to stink when it disposes of Addison DeWitt, and along with him most of the juicy psychological warfare, not to mention most of the venomously witty lines.

The 1970 "Applause" with a far superior...Bonnie Franklin!!!

But nothing quite prepared me for one of the all-time worst sequences I've ever seen on stage, an attempt at show-stopping (if only) involving the titular song (sample lyric: "Applause, applause!"). Probably because Bacall was no singer, this massively important number was entrusted with the "gypsies," the dancers who wait in the wings for their big chances to rise to the level of stardom that Margo has and that Eve is about to get. They're headed up by Bonnie (Megan Sikora, not in good voice). The song's shtick is to steal melodies from several other, much more memorable shows (I'm no expert, but I heard more than a little Fosse). Forget about waterboarding, hearing "Applause" sung to the tune of "All That Jazz" would transform the population of Gitmo into Chatty Cathys. Director Kathleen Marshall grossly miscalculated here.

And let's not get into the ooey-gooey "Good Friends," which ends with Burton doing a great, big oopsy-daisy on the stage, legs in the air, Red Skelton-style.

The "hip" ’70s setting is laughable nowadays, reminding me of another recent useless (but still at least marginally more entertaining) revival, The Ritz. There's a pained recreation of a gay bar that winds down with a queen exclaiming his love for Channing in a way that might have seemed knowing and funny 38 years ago, but that is taken for granted today.

The much more enjoyable ’70s originals.

Most of the show I spent wishing it had been chucked entirely and a whole new piece commissioned based on that amazing movie, but there were a couple of highlights worth noting. First, while I think its gay-bar trappings are silly, "But Alive" is the show's stand-out song, a pithy number with real energy and a timeless quality. Unfortunately, Ebersole—who's been battling flu and barely made opening night—was just getting warmed up.

She fared a lot better on the show's only really caustic tune, "Welcome To The Theatre," probably her finest vocal moment. But with very little support from Davie, this is no Grey Gardens.

Don't look for Applause to make it to Broadway. But more importantly, don't listen.

Springer Awakening

Cross purposes.

After watching Young@Heart (review to come) with my friend Jason, he urged me to come with him to Carnegie Hall to see if tickets might still be available for the controversial Jerry Springer: The Opera, which I remember was playing in London when I visited years ago (I think I opted for Bombay Dreams instead—yikes, mistake!) but which I'd never fully grasped to be what it is, truly an opera, not just a send-up of an opera. I went with him, we snagged tix to the last row and we walked in as the music was beginning.

At the start, I was dreading a couple of hours of torture as the singing began to bore me, just as it had the first time I ever heard opera, at the Lyric in Chicago on free tickets from my late boss. But just like the Jerry Springer Show did with many Americans, this show—directed by Jason Moore with music by Richard Thomas and book by Thomas with Stewart Lee—it quickly became addictive.

The first act involves Jerry (a non-singing, almost non-acting Harvey Keitel) hosting at typical episode of his show, featuring a man who confesses to simultaneously cheating on his girl with her crack-addicted BFF and also with a transsexual. There is also a hysterical situation involving a businessman who wants his baby to treat him like an adult baby, and to let him poop his Pampers in the process. And let's not forget the chunky housewife who dreams of being a slutty pole dancer. Whacked-out stuff, the kind you'd see on any Springer show, but hearing it communicated with beautifully-sung opera was unexpectedly hilarious and also thought-provoking.

"Crack! Whore! Crack! Whore!" intones the on-stage audience as the cheating BFF slinks onto the stage. "Talk to the hand!" she sings back.

Is trash TV the opera of the millennium? Is low art high art, and if so, how much lower can the new low art go?

"Blasphemous?" Talk to the ass!

As the act closes, Springer is shot, leading him to a forced engagement in hell, where Satan demands that he host a show featuring the devil vs. Jesus Christ. The two don't get along well at all, and Jesus is depicted as a slightly gay black man with an axe to grind—blasphemy is just another ingredient in this shock casserole—while the devil can't seem to move on from being cast out of heaven.

The show ends momentously, and not before showering the audience with several memorable recurring tunes, including "I'm seein' someone else" (part and parcel of any real Springer show) and "this is my Jerry Springer moment," a sentiment that answers the age-old question of, "Why the fuck would anyone go on TV and say and do these things?"

I was really impressed with this show, but I wouldn't invest in it on Broadway unless I were David Geffen and couldn't care less about money—are tourists going to line up for a show that features a Klansman chorus line and a cuckolded woman confessing, in song, that she spent the previous night pissing in a strange man's mouth?

Still, I wish more people could see it (it only played two nights), because watching it, I felt like it was a good example of exactly what connects cosmopolitan people with those who watch and enjoy and don't judge the real Jerry Springer—we have no qualms making light of life, death, sex, the sacred and the profane.

Oh, and speaking of low culture, we saw Monkees man Mickey Dolenz hangin' around and stood next to him during the ovation:

Wonder Never Ceases

Change their minds and change the world.

Getting someone to come with me to hear Lynda Carter sing was like trying to find someone to accompany me to debtor’s prison. Her glitzy TV specials are remembered (if at all) for their camp value, not for her vocal talents. But in answer to the many friends who looked at me while I was inviting them as if I’d just said, “I like to eat my own poop!”—yes, Lynda Carter has always sung. But never as well as in An Intimate Evening With Lynda Carter, which just finished a sold-out run at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency in Manhattan.

How some remember Lynda Carter.

I’ve only seen a cabaret act alone once, back when I braved an anomalous Yma Sumac unretirement appearance in Chicago at age 20. I wasn’t going to do it again, so after my eleventh “pass” I used all the power I possess and persuaded my partner. José has nothing against Lynda Carter (who does? who would? why should anyone?) but his chief attraction was seeing a former Miss World in the flesh and sampling Feinstein’s menu.

I was entering Carter Country.

We arrived besuited and betied and I was immediately besotted with the venue. If it were any more intimate, Ms. Carter would have been giving lap dances. (And should have for $80 tickets and a $40 food and drink minimum.) The room is small but the quarters are comfy, if you don’t mind sharing. I hadn’t mentioned that part to José, and then I panicked him by saying it looked like we’d be seated with two elderly chatterboxes. Instead, the smooth maître d' placed us with “these two gentlemen, who also look like big...Lynda Carter fans.”

The guys turned out to be a sweet couple from Toronto, Phil and A.Jaye. The latter was the bigger (only?) fan of the two, and it was cute seeing them interact. Longtime companions understand the importance of indulging our other halves occasionally, like when he wants to listen to Lynda Carter’s album Portrait on vinyl. A.Jaye wanted me to know he was a fan, but not a big fan. There are two kinds of fans—both deluded (I include myself in these categories, so don’t take this as an insult, A. Jaye!). They are the fan who insists he is the #1 fan and the fan who insists he isn’t as crazy a fan as all the others. A.Jaye had come down from Toronto specifically for a one-hour Lynda Carter cabaret act, he let slip that they sometimes watch old Wonder Woman episodes on DVD and he knew Lynda’s son’s name. Also, his mission was to get a picture with the chanteuse. That is a big fan.

The other kind was seated nearby, Webmistress Mia Cruz (me-a, too...wink-wink) of wonderland-site.com. She had on a red Wonder Woman top and was practically sitting closer to the stage than the band, but I respect those diehard fans even as I marvel at their single-mindedness, and I respected her much more once I took a look at her insanely thorough site. As our table chatted, anything we wondered aloud Mia would answer. This is how we knew how long the show would be, the difficulty A.Jaye would face in attempting to pose for a picture with her, the fact that the gig posters were $25 cash and carry.

The food was good if outrageously overpriced. José sheepishly ordered something called the PuPu Platter (seafood) for $39, only to later find out it is $39/person, but is only sold in units of two. But what’s an assload of money when it comes to Lynda Carter?

"Wonder Women" © MATTHEW RETTENMUND 2007

The show began with Lynda crooning the opening of “Deed I Do” from offstage, electrifying the roomful of gay men, old men, old gay men and admiring women. (And one kid, don’t ask me why.) When she emerged from behind me, it was plain that no 56-year-old woman has ever looked this good. Has she had plastic surgery? She has to have had something. But you’d be hard-pressed to find anything about her that looks phony. Her white blouse and form-fitting black skirt revealed her legendary figure even as she belted out the jazzy first song with a down-and-dirty confidence not to be found in her TV specials.

That and the next four numbers were flawless—a surprisingly satisfying “God Bless The Child,” a robust “Put The Blame On Mame” (“Rita Hayworth was forever identified with that one role...imagine that!” she teased), “Summertime” and “Hit Me With A Hot Note,” the last of which pushed me closer to heterosexuality than ever before.

The Monster Smash

Tickets are an arm and a leg...but which costs more, the arm or the leg?

I never saw Mel Brooks's Tony-magnet The Producers—it sounded like entertainment for people whose primary attraction to musicals is not the music but the comedy, with shows like Spamalot or The Wedding Singer also falling into that category. I tried to, but ultimately I couldn't resist Young Frankenstein (now in previews at The Hilton Theatre on W. 42nd St.); I'd never seen the movie that inspired The Producers, but I've seen Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles and High Anxiety countless times. The nostalgia factor, on top of a dream cast, drew me to the show like Frankenstein’s monster to a melody.

Now that I've seen it, I regret resisting The Producers in the first place—Young Frankenstein really breathes new life into the freshly-buried corpse that is the original musical. It is a successful hybrid of the type of cynical production that nods to a pre-established, non-theatrical cult following in order to ensure longevity on the Great White Way (Mamma Mia!, Xanadu) and an old-school revival of a familiar Broadway franchise (Chicago, 42nd Street). As the people seated next to me harrumphed, the book is “low art—Borscht-belt!” but the show as a whole also pushes the medium forward with clever production risks and offers up some first-rate performances that make it anything but simply a guilty pleasure.

With electrifying chemistry, Mel Brooks and director/choreographer Susan Stroman make high art out of low.

Babbling Brooks.

The audience was dominated by patrons who seemed to be Mel Brooks fans in their fifties on up, clearly there for a nostalgic take on a favorite flick. I had spectacular seats (F 103-104) and could see from where I was that the place was mostly full except for about six seats in front of and behind me. Just as the lights went down, Mel Brooks himself was hustled into one of the seats in front of me, accompanied by a male assistant with a notebook. This is exactly what happened when I saw Joe Mantello's infinitely inferior The Ritz, except that I'd snuck down to better seats for The Ritz without paying (thank God) and had paid full price for Young Frankenstein. Unfortunately, a guy nearly as tall as the monster stole the seat in front of me and had me sitting so high up in my seat I could have turned my head a little and held a whispering conversation with the balcony.

It was a bit of bathhouse karma that I richly deserved.

Brooks is a small guy who wore a baseball cap for the first part of the show, later removing it to reveal a shock of white hair—he looked kind of like Norman Mailer, or Norman Fell...definitely a Norman. I was charmed by the fact that he mouthed literally every word of the show, except for the briefest of moments when he nodded off. Got to admire his creativity, work ethic and career-reinvention—he deserves to catch 40 winks here and there.

No one else was sleeping—Young Frankenstein is loud, frenetic and aggressively engaging visually. There has been carping about ticket prices, but if $120-and-up is a lot to spend for two and a half hours of amusement, Brooks & Co. spent your money in obvious ways—top-tier performers and spectacular sets.

Psycho Bitch Party

Bush's Angela Arden is a misleading lady.

Before attending Die Mommie Die! on Broadway, we ate at Vynl, where I took my trusty iPhone with me into a couple of the theme bathrooms—they're all one-person units devoted to different pop-culture icons. I got stuck with Nelly—NELLY, THE RAPPER?—at first, but he wasn't worth the urine. So I slipped out and waited for Elvis. They also had Cher and Dolly Parton, but both were occupied. The fact that we would want to create places to eliminate waste themed to pop-culture icons says something about our obsession with stars—they're so vital to us we can't bear to be away from them even while taking a leak. It was a logical if, by comparison, quite crude way to begin an evening staged by Charles Busch, whose understanding of such things is said to be unsurpassed.

I walked into Die Mommie Die!, the stage version of the 2003 Charles Busch film, itself the film version of his previous play, somewhat ambivalent. In theory, I should be a major Busch fan—he’s gay, he’s funny, he has an impeccable and encyclopedic knowledge of Old Hollywood films...what’s not to like? On top of it all, a friend of mine once gave me a Playbill from Vampire Lesbians of Sodom while I was in college as a sort of talisman representing the wide queer world out there waiting for us once we got the hell out of Hyde Park in Chicago. More directly, I had seen and really loved a Chicago adaptation of Psycho Beach Party around the same time.

But over the years, I’ve had a lot of bad experiences with drag entertainment. So much of it is superstupid—you know, the kind for which you need to be drunk off your ass in a bar 10 minutes from scoring tail in order to be in a good enough mood to actually laugh at it. More to the point, I found the films Psycho Beach Party and Die Mommie Die! to be sort of fun but nothing memorable. I was wondering if a stage version could elevate the material.

Broadly comic or a comic broad?

Presented at New World Stages—a sort of live-theatre warehouse with which I hadn’t been familiar but instantly warmed to—Die Mommie Die! as directed by Carl Andress proved to me that drag, at least in the hands (and on the hips) of Charles Busch, is not a dead art form. In fact, Die Mommie Die! proves to be an engaging vehicle constructed to allow Busch to demonstrate the original brilliance of drag, to prove it's very much alive when it's done right.

Set in the ‘60s mansion of rich producer Sol Sussman (Bob Ari) and his retired diva wife psycho bitch Angela Arden (Busch), Die Mommie Die! is a potboiler that makes Peyton Place look like Candyland. Angela hasn’t sung since her last flop movie, but just because she’s lost her voice doesn’t mean she’s lost her libido—she’s shamelessly affairing with TV loser (but pelvic winner) Tony Parker (Chris Hoch), a fact not lost on her rueful daughter Edith (Ashley Morris) or her adoring son-ette Lance (Van Hansis).

Confronted over her infidelity—such a delicate word when it refers to being on the receiving end of an 11-inch penis right under one's husband's unfortunate nose—Angela spikes Sol’s suppository with poison, opportunistically turning a bad case of constipation into a convenient case of dead. Edith, who’d been all but sleeping with her beloved daddy, doesn’t believe his death was natural and convinces her hopelessly homosexual brother to help her tape their mother’s acid-induced confession.

Lana in The Big Cube: Who's yer mommie?

It could be said that many classic Hollywood melodramas are not about their plots so much as their style, and the same is true of Die Mommie Die!—Busch has cooked up a ridiculous story directly inspired by Lana Turner’s LSD howler The Big Cube and Bette Davis’s equally hysterical Dead Ringer as well as career-ending genre films like Die! Die! My Darling!, Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte and Strait-Jacket.

But to say this play and its creator are all about style is to make them sound shallow where they’re more deep studies of the shallow conventions of some of Hollywood’s greatest and not-so-greatest films. Busch’s every gesture and line reading—he sure knows how to wrap his vocal cords around tricky diction—echo the formal language of a host of leading ladies, most obviously Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Susan Hayward and Lana Turner. His cracking of their code, his mastery of their peculiar lahnguage, makes him the missing link between high-maintenance Hollywood women and their gay male devotees.

Purple cinema: Where Hollywood meets West Hollywood.

The only downside to Busch’s riveting performance—weakened only by his occasional projection problems—is that the other performers and the play itself at times become beside the point. All of the actors perform the campy material with abandon, even the occasionally overlong interludes or too-silly jokes (“Haul out that bratwurst and spread some mustard on it???”), though I was more bothered than bewitched by Kristine Nielsen’s obnoxious Southern maid Bootsie Carp. That said, probably the most crackling scene involves a hissing show-down between Bootsie and Angela, in which Angela snaps, “I don’t take threats from maids.”

One of the funniest plays I’ve seen in quite a while, Die Mommie Die! easily outpaces the film but can’t quite contain the man who wrote it—or the woman he inhabits to bring it to life.

When the play ended, the most wonderful thing happened—it was only the second night of previews and Busch received huge applause and an ovation, but he stopped us prematurely to speak. He joked that second nights are usually the worst but that we'd proven that wrong, then he thanked us sincerely for coming. "I'm so grateful," he said warmly. It was not quite in character as Angela Arden, it was more like he was in character as whatever great imaginary actress was playing Angela Arden in this comeback role. Just like Lana Turner has a role within a role in The Big Cube, and just like all great ladies of the stage and screen can be said to be acting even when a scene ends or the director barks, "Cut!" It was positively eerie and the perfect ending to a near-perfect evening.

I may even remember it till the day I die die.