The Full Monty |
Against the depressed blues and the rust of old corrugated steel, a glittering curtain of gold fringe comes down in Buffalo. Dirty hot jazz and warm lights come up. And soon enough, a business jacket and tear-away pants are coming off a rather elegantly ripped man named “Keno.”It’s girls’ night out in Buffalo, and these ladies are a particularly good niche market for business suit fantasies in light of what is happening, that very night, over at the union hall. There, in a harsh fluo-reality and without any glitter, the men in their lives are collecting their dole checks — the nth since being laid off from the steel mill months before. Down-and-out Jerry Lukowski and his overweight buddy Dave Bukatinsky (Jeremy Kushnier and Michael Aaron Linder, both excellent) break into the strip club’s squalid men’s room, hear their women yelping, and wallow in emasculation. And then Jerry gets some ideas. With his ex threatening to revoke his custody of their son, Nathan (Zach Freitag, nimbly), Jerry suddenly he thinks he knows just how to rouse up the cash he needs for child support. Thus the warming upward trajectory of The Full Monty (directed by Charles Abbott in a Maine State Music Theatre production that rates damn near a perfect 10), which charts the rise of an unlikely troupe of working-class male strippers called Hot Metal.
Jerry proceeds to throw together a rag-tag crew of reluctant would-be strippers. He first picks up neurotic Malcolm (Chuck Ragsdale, with a gaze that swings delightfully from that of a kicked cur to that of a kid in a candy store), who lives with his mom and is trying to give himself carbon monoxide poisoning when they meet. Next they blackmail participation out of Harold (Ed Romanoff, with a great deadpan) once a higher-up at the plant and a fine Latin dancer, but now out-of-work himself and hiding it from his expensive wife. Auditions yield “Horse” Simmons (C.E. Smith, mouthwateringly), an aging but still ass-shaking black man (“Ain’t nothin’ in the world like a big black man,” goes one of the best refrains in the show); and Ethan (Gregg Goodbrod), who isn’t a singer, a dancer, or the sharpest knife in the drawer, but who has another pertinent endowment going for him.
Together, this gang is a tight and immensely satisfying package of characters with immaculate singing voices; and it’s pure pleasure to watch them exchange their quips, barbs, worries, and bear hugs. Each character has an ambitious emotional and musical range to negotiate, and these guys — particularly the fine Kushnier and Lindner — deliver the real goods. Supporting roles are also superlative, especially the jaded homosexual pro-stripper Keno (an understated plum of a role in the hands of Roger Rosen); the whip-smart, joint-toking old pianist Jeanette (Connie Schafer); and Portland favorites Sean Demers and Graham Allen in a variety of ensemble roles.
