Aimee Doherty and Brendan McNab |
The Maltese falcon mates with the loon in Adrift in Macao (at the Lyric Stage Company through February 2). Christopher Durang’s broad spoof of film noir, with a score by Peter Melnick that mambos from Kurt Weill to Carmen Miranda, is set in 1952 in the Chinese port of Macao — a sinister locale peopled by diamond smugglers, shady nightclub owners, dope aficionados, femmes fatales, and a walking, winking Asian cliché named Tempura, because he’s been “battered by life.” You get the drift — or perhaps the adrift.
As in Casablanca, whose transient denizens are waiting for visas, most of Macao is just (as the title song indicates) waiting — as if for Godot. Indeed, the word “existential” is invoked, though, this being 1952, no one knows what it means. There are a couple of exceptions, one being the sexy, hard-boiled Lureena, who tumbles off a ship in a cinched silver gown looking for work as a singer. Hailing a rickshaw, she’s greeted by a nightclub owner named “Rick Shaw,” who at once offers her a job.
Also fresh off the boat is a taciturn American named Mitch, a sort of expatriate equivalent of the Fugitive, who’s looking for the man who framed him for murder and then vamoosed. Mitch wants to force the guy into the confession that will clear his name so he can prove Thomas Wolfe wrong by going home again. The villain’s name: MacGuffin, in honor of Alfred Hitchcock’s term for the gimmick that drives the plot — though silliness is pretty much what drives the plot of Adrift in Macao, which may amuse you if the above description does.
The slinky score is fun, and so is the Lyric production, which is directed by Stephen Terrell, with musical direction by Jonathan Goldberg. Last-minute replacement Brendan McNab acquits himself well as Rick Shaw, especially on the tonsil-massaging big number ostensibly purchased by the character after the authors failed to give him one. As Lureena, effortless soprano Aimee Doherty washes ashore exuding sultry alienation in the Weill-derived “In a Foreign City (in a slinky dress).” Hired, she must do Dynasty-worthy girl battle — pitting “Pretty Moon over Macao” against the improbable “Mambo Malaysian” — with Kathy St. George’s perky, opium-addicted Corrina, Rick Shaw’s current singer and inamorata. Presiding from the piano is pigtailed, black-pajama’d Tempura (the excellent Austin Ku), who despite his frequent and petulant claim to “scrutability” is as suspicious as three-day-old sushi. (I know, wrong Asian cuisine, but so is tempura.)
Adrift in Macao lasts only 90 minutes, but it’s too long. Unlike those in Durang’s angrier farces, the jokes here, if sometimes funny, are benign. Melnick contributes some infectious tunes, among them Lureena’s torcher, “So Long,” and the annoyingly catchy “Ticky Ticky Tock,” which makes its way from Bangkok to New York. “Revelation,” whose subject matter cannot be revealed, is the most hilarious, built on some bizarre ethnic shapeshifting by Tempura. But this brief show becomes tiresome long before it has folded its trenchcoat.
