THE OPPOSITE OF SEX: Kerry Butler’s DeDee gives new meaning to “white trash.” |
Although there’s been a recent stampede of material from screen to stage, the 1998 screwball comedy/mixed-mating film The Opposite of Sex hardly seems the stuff of Broadway musicals. And co-librettist and director Robert Jess Roth, whose best-known credit is the transfer of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast from celluloid to worldwide stage success, appears an incongruous makeover man for a potty-mouthed anti-heroine like DeDee Truitt. But guess again. Roth and Douglas J. Cohen, the show’s composer/lyricist and co-author, have lifted screenwriter/director Don Roos’s subversive commentary on morality and homophobia almost intact and set it rocking on stage. The performance I caught last week at Williamstown Theatre Festival’s Nikos Stage (where the show continues through August 20) seemed to shock some of the blue-haired matinee audience. But the AARP members who did not leave at intermission actually cheered at the end.
Kerry Butler as brat-faced 16-year-old DeDee gives new depth to “white trash.” Her narration (mirroring the voiceover in the film) doesn’t so much break the fourth wall as blast through it like a renegade rocket. Butler, who did a stint as Belle in Beauty , has a professionally honed voice, to which she adds a stuck-on-herself demeanor and enough sexual swagger to power the stage lights. Her DeDee has never met a boy she wouldn’t bang, a rule she wouldn’t break (from larceny to murder), or an authority figure she couldn’t wind to her selfish purpose. Still, she’s the one to watch and root for here as a latter-day personification of George Bernard Shaw’s Life Force.
The plot, a gloss on road movies, brings DeDee from her home in Louisiana to gay half-brother Bill’s sanctuary in Indiana, where he lives with dumb stud Matt and grieves for his late lover, Tom, who died of AIDS. Bill’s best friend is Tom’s sister, bitter spinster teacher Lucia, who’s trying to get Bill for herself. Enter Carl, the straight town cop and widower who secretly loves Lucia. Meanwhile, Matt, who’s been cheating on Bill with body-pierced blackmailer Jason, gets seduced by DeDee and starts to think that he might go “normal.” (This is a gay-cult-film plot?)
A stellar company of seven actors — including Gregg Edelman as Bill, Kaitlin Hopkins as Lucia, and Herndon Lackey as Carl — are led on a Keystone Kops–like chase over multiple interstate highways, everyone eventually changing partners under DeDee’s manipulation; by the end, this somewhat distasteful clutch of characters have become endearing. Set designer Derek McLane’s wall-mounted models, lit to show changes of scene, give a clever indication of the geographical roving.
Cohen supplies a winsome score, intelligent lyrics, and a sensational ballad for Carl, “Look for Me First.” Add that to Roth’s adroit staging, the quip-filled dialogue, and a cast that gets Roos’s cynical intentions and the show looks to have legs — though they’re more likely to stand up Off Broadway than on.
