The Blackest Shore Catastrophic Theatre brings the work of New York-based up-and-coming playwright Mark Schulz to us twice this season. Closing out the year is Schultz’s play Everything Will Be Different: A Brief History of Helen of Troy, a show about teen girl anguish. On offer now is the premiere of The Blackest Shore, a play ostensibly about male teenage trauma and coping. The teen in this case is Stuart, and he’s making a violent movie that’s part zombie thriller, part gothic vampire tale and part Lord of the Rings with a healthy dash of porn thrown in for good measure. Stuart’s dad has done something horrible and therefore isn’t around, and his mom is about to invite her boyfriend (Josh Morrison), whom Stuart can’t stand, into their home to live with them. Schultz’s play starts off moody enough with projections of tumultuous black and white ocean tides on four parallelogram-shaped video screens covering the back wall of the stage. A disembodied voice reads a poem about blackness and shorelines, evoking feelings of dread or at least depression. But just when we think we’re in for an evening of angst, Schultz switches the mood and gives us comedy. Stuart (an energetically natural Gabriel Regojo) pitches his slasher/hero movie to the AV club with the excitement over movie violence that only a hormonally hopped-up teen can muster. He riffs off all the gore he plans on depicting while making sure to add that it’s also a love story in the realm of a porno. It’s a clever chuckle that sets up this seesaw script that has a hard time deciding what it wants to be and what it’s trying to say. On the one hand, we learn fairly early that the reason Stuart’s dad isn’t around is that he molested him at a young age. On the other hand, Stuart doesn’t seem all that bothered by his history with his dad and instead desperately wants to go live with him. It’s the premise of the transparently metaphoric movie he’s trying to make. A dark overlord is lonely and comes to rescue his son from those who don’t realize how special he is. Obviously, Stuart has some issues. The hulking Regojo does a nifty job playing him as an in-your-face, smart-mouthed, funny kid. One whom no one seems to really care about. Certainly not his mom (Elizabeth Marshall Black), whom Schultz makes unnecessarily unlikable and in her own way as abusive as the father. Not Trisha (Candice D’Meza), his New Agey therapist who comically asks him to find his “inner animal.” Certainly not his father, Dallas (John Gremillion), who may go down as one of the most shallowly written and narratively awkward pedophiles onstage. Like the scenic tone seesaw at the start of the play, Schultz plays flip-flop with Dallas, making him a meek and weirdly sympathetic child abuser one moment and then a drunken and comedic character in another. We aren’t laughing in a dark-humor kind of fashion; the comedy is just for straight laughs, but for what purpose? We don’t know, and as a result, the character and his effect on Stuart seem throwaway at best and even perhaps insulting at worst. Where The Blackest Shore really does excite, however, is in the complex relationship between Stuart and his new gay wallflower friend, George (the superlative Zachary Leonard). It’s here that Schultz’s writing shows tender insight into the emotional ravages eating away at Stuart. Stuart may not be able to articulate to George what ails him or what caused it, but in the way teenage boys say a lot by what they don’t say, we finally get a window into Stuart’s damaged places and how that damage begets more sorrow. Director Jason Nodler runs the show with clear stage management that at times manages to shrug off what just isn’t on the page, but too often he falls victim to the script’s schizophrenia. A rushed final insightful scene saps what little meaning we may glean from the script. Tim Thompson’s video designs are thankfully not so enamoured of themselves that they need to steal the show. Whether they depict oversize alarm clocks in bedroom scenes, piecemeal lockers at school or a live cafe scene when Stuart and his father first reunite, the effect is surreally inviting and greatly adds to the minimalist set design. Schultz certainly has something to say about how abuse affects a young man’s life. He even has a different and disturbing take on how a victim reacts to that abuse. But exactly what he wants us to take away from his work gets terribly muddied by a play that doesn’t know which stylistic direction it wants to go or how the supporting characters serve the message. There’s nothing wrong with injecting comedy into a tragic story or asking us to consider repugnant characters, but Schultz does so without context or irony, causing the tropes to topple in on themselves despite the engaging performances by his two teen male characters. Through March 7. Catastrophic Theatre, 1119 East Freeway, catastrophictheatre.com. — JG
Kinky Boots The rousing, boisterous Act I finale to the Tony award-winning Kinky Boots is a nonstop perpetual mobile of high kicks and swirling stage action, set to Cyndi Lauper’s triumphant feel-good disco anthem “Everybody Say Yeah.” It raises the roof. Set in a shoe factory and making the utmost out of the conveyor-belt assembly line, the number is the ultimate in show-stopping stagecraft, as the entire cast romps, runs in place or sweeps along the moving runway. A new pair of boots has made a star turn — lipstick red, patent leather, thigh-high, with stratospheric stiletto heels. The fetishwear shoes, the prototype designed by drag queen Lola, glisten and sparkle in the spotlight. They shoot off sparks. Against all odds, will they will save Charlie’s failing shoe business, keep the old factory alive and bond the old school to the new? Will the gruff, lower-class male workers come to love flamboyant Lola? Will drag queens eventually rule the world? You bet your ass! I ask these questions, even though the show’s outcome is never in doubt. There’s not a single surprise to be had in this entertaining, manufactured musical. Life flows across the footlights, but it’s so embalmed under layers of previous shows, there’s nothing original in it. It’s paint-by-numbers with all plot points duly checked off. Drag queen with daddy issues? Check. Homophobic factory workers who will see the error of their ways? Check. Mousy co-worker who catches the eye of the hero? Check. Hero and drag queen say horrible things to each other to ramp up drama in Act II? Check. Plastered all over the place are Hallmark truisms: Accept someone for who they are; be true to yourself; change your mind and you change the world. These needlepoint samplers certainly might be true, but they passed their sell-by date decades ago, thanks to pioneering forebears such as La Cage aux Folles, Torch Song Trilogy, Priscilla Queen of the Desert and even Billy Elliot. Kinky Boots is stuck in the ’80s. Now, this isn’t the worst place to be stuck in, especially when Lauper’s music is so infectious and bouncy. This is a surprisingly adroit Broadway debut, her score filled with dancey tunes and heartfelt ballads. I can’t comment on her talents as a lyricist, though, because I strained all evening to make sense of what was said onstage. The cavernous Hobby Center is notorious for its dead sound quality, and no audio designer as yet has been able to conquer it, but this show is garbled, muffled and terribly tinny. Even the dialogue passages are difficult to understand. Somebody has got to fix this! The show’s other saving grace is veteran director/choreographer Jerry Mitchell, who puts the highest gloss on everything. Even the sequins have sequins. This is four-star staging, a master class with impeccable pace and timing. Boots kicks up its high heels as if on parade. Darius Harper makes a most handsome man in drag — he looks pretty spiffy in a suit, too — Eartha Kitt with a lot of RuPaul. Feisty and fiery, ready with a quip, he’s a festive show all by himself. He’s d’lovely. Steven Booth’s nebbish Charlie is no match for Lola in the personality department, but he holds his own with his pop star wail of a voice. Lindsay Nicole Chambers stops the show with her comic lament “The History of Wrong Guys,” where she begins to fall for the boss, much to her own surprise and glee. Kinky Boots carries its heart on its sleeve. Programmed to be cute and meaningful but not offend anyone, the show has loads of charm and razor-sharp showbiz know-how. Although it’s saddled with “been there, done that,” when Lauper does it, it all seems somehow new and sparkly. Girls just wanna have fun, she sang in her hit song ages ago. In eight-inch heels, she’s having the time of her life — again. Through February 22. Theatre Under the Stars, Hobby Center, 800 Bagby, 713-558-8887. — DLG
Ruthless! The Musical If there’s a soft spot in your jaded little heart for a skewed, off-centered, off-Broadway musical, this quirky little show at Standing Room Only will be catnip. A wacky combo of Gypsy, The Bad Seed and Forbidden Broadway, with more than an elbow-poke of All About Eve around its wickedly tattered edges, this parody of a parody has a devilishly clever book and lyrics by Joel Paley and Jerry Herman-like hummable music by Marvin Laird. The show is utterly delightful. Forget Kinky Boots; the gayest musical of the month is Ruthless! The Musical. Here’s what happens: Little Tina Denmark (tyke Sarah Leonard in wicked, scene-stealing mode with leather lungs like Merman) is one of those precocious showbiz brats who do five minutes when they open the refrigerator and the light goes on. She tap-dances on the coffee table to show off, while Mom Judy (Lindsay Kersey, the other cast member with real lungs) follows up with a can of Pledge. Tina’s got talent, and she’ll entertain you until one of you drops from exhaustion — I assure you, it won’t be her! She wants the glamorous life of a star so bad she can taste it, even though Mom, with Donna Reed hair and pearls over hostess dress, worries where all that talent has come from. But Sylvia St. Croix (Jay Menchaca, in heavenly drag) knows. Crisply tailored, Miss St. Croix, a parade float of broad-shouldered chutzpah, becomes Tina’s agent, mentor, Svengali. If Tina was born to entertain, then Sylvia’s mission is to see that talent infect the world, like Ebola. Whatever it takes, Tina will be a star, even if it’s over somebody’s dead body. And all before you can say Shirley Temple. The story continues with shocking ridiculousness, each new revelation funnier than the last; past lives unmasked, reconciliations swooned over. Tina, of course, serves time for her murderous pursuit of fame and fortune, and when she emerges from the Daisy Clover School for Psychopathic Ingenues, her mother Judy has become a Tony-winning star on Broadway. There are comic turns from Lauren Hainley, as the ultimate harried third-grade teacher and actress wannabe; Katy Butler as child bully Louise, and then in Act II, Judy’s scheming gal Friday Eve; and Cheryl Duffin as chopped liver Lita Encore, a battleaxe critic. This type of tomfoolery with its bitchy backstage barbs and snappy attitude requires a defter touch than that supplied by director Christine Weems. There’s no rhythm to the mayhem, and scenes drag terribly — no pun intended. The effervescence so apparent in the musical numbers goes flat in the dialogue scenes. Kersey, though, need do nothing more. She’s a consummate pro, and musicals are in her genes. Her operatic sweep of a voice is pitch-perfect, whether answering the turquoise rotary phone as June Cleaver look-alike in “Tina’s Mother” (a song Sondheim would be proud to call his own), or as Broadway diva Ginger Del Marco in the mock-heroic anthem “It Will Never Be That Way Again.” One way or the other, 11-year-old Miss Leonard is fated for Broadway. With trumpet voice and ability to wink at the audience, she absolutely mesmerizes. She’s got comic timing, the pipes of Bernadette Peters and a theater trunk full of stage presence. She’s the real thing. Menchaca has a ball as Sylvia, looking both glamorous and seedy. He deliciously fills out a gold sequin gown, then later sashays in an emerald green A-line coat as if channeling Audrey Hepburn (emerald is your color, Mr. Menchaca). Although he can veer off-key at a moment’s notice, his singing is akin to that of a breathy Rex Harrison, but he’s having such campy fun he pulls it off with wicked panache. Weems and Wayne Landon’s set design sparkles with deft little touches such as Judy’s sunny display of colorful bar ware and that liquor bottle that will get a lot of use, and Ginger’s Art Deco-inspired penthouse that has wallpaper to match Eve’s dress. Landon doubles as musical director, and the sound of his sprightly quartet could fill a Broadway house. But in Obsidian Art Space, with its Lilliputian square footage, why do the actors have to use body mikes? The amplification is unnecessary overkill. Ruthless! is big, bold and cheesy, just how we like our off-Broadway musicals. Where else would we be inspired by such a timeless homily, “Life is a bitch, and it starts in third grade.” Ah, so true, so true. Go, and find out what life upon the wicked stage is really like. Through February 28. Obsidian Art Space, 3522 White Oak Drive, 713-300-2358. — DLG
This article appears in Feb 19-25, 2015.
