Saturday night feminists live
By CAROLYN CLAY | March 31, 2006
The name of the troupe Broad Comedy is double-edged. Except for co-writer Soren Kisiel, the perpetrators of this feminist music-and-comedy revue are all female: “the broads.” On the other edge, the comedy is indeed as broad as the USA, of which the comics (an outgrowth of Equinox Theatre Company) are a mixed constituent: a bunch of girly liberals from “the middle of the little blue-state town of Bozeman in the middle of the huge red state of Montana.” Writer and director Katie Goodman being the daughter of syndicated Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman, the revue has landed here in more consistently like-minded territory, playing Saturday nights at the Stuart Street Playhouse (indefinitely). Led by tall, prancing Goodman, the broads are a likable if predictable lot from whose mix of Bush bashing and feminist lampoon you should not expect the subtlety of Noël Coward. The show is more like a romp put on by the cleverer left-leaning ladies in your high school, complete with cheerleading and Oklahoma! send-ups.
The five merry pranksters first take the stage like the sleazy Kit Kat girls of Cabaret , arraying jutting, fishnet-stockinged legs on wooden chairs as they bark an ode to female depilation titled “Mein Hair.” The Oklahoma! number, “The Pro-Life & The Pro-Choice Should Be Friends,” features do-si-doing frontier ladies of the two persuasions in an uneasy dance, the Christian right maintaining that the Bible says thou shalt not kill, Goodman’s pro-choicer, not missing a square-dance step, replying, “So how come you’re killing all our doctors?” There are also takes on Chicago and gospel as well as a ridiculous “Housewife: The Ballet” set to The Nutcracker and featuring leaps and plungers.
Some of the straight (well, non-musical) material is more droll. In “I Hear What You’re Saying,” two clueless guys, signed up by their wives for therapy to help them communicate as friends, fluster their therapist by being unable to get beyond invitations to a beer or discussion of a new grill. This piece succeeds in part because as Carolann DiPirro’s counselor goes into frustration meltdown, Maggie Ricklefs and Erin Roburg, in matching backwards baseball caps, earnestly try to learn a foreign language. Also amusing are a slumber-party number for fundamentalist teens who are saving their hymens for Jesus (I particularly enjoyed the echo of “amen” in “hymen” ) and one of two sketches featuring young mothers on a park bench. In this one (overlong, like the other), the prude of the group has to be walked through the meaning of “camel toe” as a description of the crotch effect made by tight pants. Both of the aforementioned routines are commemorated on souvenir underwear sold in the lobby, along with CDs of the show, which manages to be freewheeling and cute at the same time but doesn’t provide a very high brow for the pluckers and waxers of “Mein Hair” to depilate.
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