A Letter from Summer Camp
mspt@goldfishpublishers.com
Vampire Lesbians
of Sodom and Sleeping
Beauty; or Coma
by
Charles Busch
Directed by
Ricky Araiza and Julie Holston
Artists' Theatre
Project
The Space Theater, Phoenix
(602) 307-0809
July
8th - 24th, 2005
$20.00
Hello mudduh, hello faddah,
Here I am at the sweltering Space Theatre, fans whirring everywhere, no relief to the heat in sight. Performances at this storefront should be reconsidered until the temperature dips below the lowest setting on a stove. I am sweating so much, I’m turning into a human salt lick. My wife has already fled with the car, afraid of sitting near me since my Right Guard left. And this is before the fans have been turned down and Sandy Leon’s limited lights have been turned on.
Despite this, I am looking forward to Artists’ Theatre Project’s production of Charles Busch’s camp classics Vampire Lesbians of Sodom and Sleeping Beauty; or Coma. This is a flashback to the long lost days of Planet Earth when local critic Neil Cohen donned the falsies of Condessa. Five years later, we have Matthew Harris, recently of ATP’s Koko, strapping on his fake boobs again. ATP has split their directing duties with Julie Holston taking on the curtain opener and Ricky Araiza helming the main and more famous script. Most of the parts are double cast, though. But what’s this? A woman (Aleah Baker) in the roles of Madeline and Enid/Briar Rose! It’s a scandal, it’s an outrage. How could they? How dare they? I’m beginning to rethink letting my wife drive off without me.
Down goes the fan directly blowing on me, and up snap the lights (aren’t there more levels than this available?) to highlight Baker and Sandy Leon as Miss Thick. Though the presence of real breasts does not bother me in execution, it’s the whole theoretical thing that puts me off. However, as the show goes along, I start to fall under the spell of Baker’s wide-eyed intensity and earnest approach to campiness. All right, so a girl playing a girl is not going to be as bad as I thought, but she’s only half of the duet. Bring on Harris. Leon and Scott Pierce’s Sebastian are a winning combination. Both are much more overt and over the top than Baker, and I can’t help but think of Austin Powers’ Dr. Evil based on their great mod costumes by Doug Loynd. Finally, Harris makes his entrance. My reviews have been mixed on Harris before, but I’ve never seen him in drag. He’s quite funny! His bitchiness is not Joan Collins or Bette Davis, but an eager and oddly likeable female version of his own personality. Throw in Wolfram Ott’s Ian, an easygoing member of the trio, and this becomes a Coma to stay awake for. Holston’s directing seems to be intent on finding funny freeze frame moments and keeping the camp from going too far, solid choices. All right, the curtain opener has worked, but I’m still in danger of falling into a coma of my own without an infusion of electrolytes.
With a re-shifting of the fan, a couple of bottles of cold water, and an acknowledgement that I’d be too guilty to leave for any other reason than an awful production, I am pushing on. The scene shifts from a London of mixed accents to ancient Sodom outside of the vagina-shaped cave of the Succubus. Here, Baker loses a little of her charm as she spends an awful lot of the time lifting her constantly drooping tube top. This is the only costume faux pas, as the other Loynd creations are fantastic. Harris enters, and once again, he’s surprisingly understated. This isn’t a bad thing, since the situation is already pretty out there, so he once again turns his charge, this time the Succubus Condessa, into a bitch with a heart of gold. As the two of them move from Sodom through 20s Hollywood to land in the Vegas of Robert Urich, they raise the stakes without reaching the heights of camp. Those heights are left to people like Brian Klein as the mass murdering butler Etienne and later as the body image-challenged chorine Danny, Emily Smith as the farm girl with stars in her eyes and an agenda a’la Eve, Ott and Carlos Alvarez as personifications of the chorus boy cliché, and a show stopping moment by Whitney Farris. If there’s any problem I have with Holston’s taming of his two leads is that they never seem to rise to the levels of Dynasty-like cat fighting frenzy that allows for the denouement to be satisfying. These vampire lesbians are never back (or rather neck) biting enough to raise this show to the levels of camp for which Busch was famous.
As I pour myself into the car, I decide that under less physically debilitating circumstances, this can be an enjoyable midsummer’s romp. Should someone fix the A.C., kindly disregard this letter.
Cheers,
Rehydrating Critic
-30-
