BETTER ME THAN YOU: Dueling talents. |
Some folks just have it. Others spend way too much time in front of mirrors, pricey acting coaches, or web cams trying to find it. What I’m talking about is the good old show-biz currency of talent — what it takes to make the little people laugh, cry, and compulsively purchase tie-in merchandise. But where does it come from? Is it passed along genetically, like freckles or hemophilia? Or is it picked up from environmental interactions, like French or herpes? If talent’s not in your blood, can you still acquire it? And if it is (to put it another way) is there a cure?
The nature/nurture theatricals turn lethal and delectably tongue-in-cheek in the Good Theater’s season opener, Ruthless!, a musical lampoon that amalgamates the pathologies of The Bad Seed, Gypsy, All About Eve, The Women, and Valley of the Dolls. We’re talking moms, daughters, strangulation, and all kinds of nasty ego transference. Brian P. Allen directs five of the area’s nimblest and most virtuoso women — plus the statuesque Stephen Underwood in drag — in a sly, sonorous send-up of talent, its sources, and its menace.
Where, oh where does Tina get it from, is what Judy Denmark (Kelly Caufield) is wondering, a little nervously. Demure, accommodating, and aggressively untalented, Judy seems mystifyingly unlike her 10-year-old daughter Tina (Haley Bennett), a rabidly precocious singer/dancer/actress.
Judy, keeping her floral, ’50s-looking household clean and banal, doesn’t grok her offspring’s spotlight ambitions at all. So it’s a good thing that seen-it-all Sylvia (Underwood, deliciously) shows up out of nowhere to take over as stage-mother. Of most immediate concern is getting Tina the lead in the school play, and if you don’t think a third-grade production of “Pippi in Tahiti” is worth a little homicide, you should probably forget about Broadway.
But who really is the angular, wigged, gin-swilling Sylvia? And why the heck is Judy so twitchy and flashback-prone all of a sudden? Naturally, things like past, lineage, and complicity end up proving complex and reliably not-quite-what-they-seem. These kooky women propel quite a romp, and Allen has slipped superlative local actors into luscious character roles: Relish the formidably savvy Denise Poirier, both as jaded theater-aspirant-turned-third-grade-teacher Myrna Thorn, and as Miss Block, the butch, yellow-pant-suited reporter from the New York Thesbian (sic!). Savor Amy Roche, whose versatility and deadpan wit are always dazzling, as Tina’s young rival Louise and as the psychopathic personal assistant Eve. A fan of Stephen Underwood’s every lanky, droll incarnation, I delighted in his devilish and wild-eyed Sylvia more than I can possibly make clear. And I have a soft spot for any show that sends up the theater critic; this one casts the shrewd and exuberant Cathy Counts as Lita Encore, Judy’s adopted mother, who comes to town to review Tina’s Pippi.
