Friday, August 15, 2008

Theater reviews: Zanna, Don’t! and A Streetcar Named Desire

By Arnold Wayne Jones of Dallas Voice

Mike Morgan

IT TAKES A VILLAGE PEOPLE: In the bizarro world of Zanna, Don't!, the gay chess team captain is the school hero, while its resident jock deals with the shame of having feelings for a — gulp! — “girl.”

Watermelon, running through sprinklers, Zanna, Don't! — the perfect trifecta for simple summer enjoyment. Uptown Players' regional premiere of Tim Acito’s bizarro musical teen fable — where gays are cool and heteros hide their shame in the closet — is an airy meringue of a show that’s not half as serious as it sounds, and it sounds feather-light.

Zanna (Ryan Cowles), a fabulous teenaged gay Yenta, plays matchmaker with his magic wand, setting up guy-guy, girl-girl couples. Things go wrong when the football star (James Chandler) begins to fall for the prom queen (Kayla Carlisle). Horrors!

Any alternative universe where musical theater is an engine for political change is simply too campy not to love, but it helps that Acito’s pastiche score combines bits of Grease, Hair, High School Musical, Pippin and Hairspray with zesty abandon.

It’s not just the score, but director Coy Covington’s droll concept that shamelessly wrings every element for laughs — from Chandler’s creamsicle-colored football uniform to Zanna’s lifeless bird friend to the rainbow of T-shirts when the kids, in the best Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney fashion, decide to put on a show! (The resulting “Don’t ask, don’t tell” number is performed, intentionally, as rigidly as Japanese theater — call it Queerbuki.)

The cast could solve the energy crisis if someone could harness their energy. I was exhausted by the end of the opening number, a tribute to “Summer Lovin’,” and there were 90 minutes still to come. I sat rapt by Steven Guez’s gorgeous solo, “I Could Write Books,” panted incredulously at the tongue-twisting bravura of “Fast,” laughed joyously at Lindsey Holloway’s dykey waitress and Chandler’s clueless jock.

Zanna is a toe-tapping, grin-inducing, flirtatious, giddy confection, a queer fantasy with the wide-eyed wonder of children’s theater. If it were any fluffier, it would simply float away.

A Streetcar Named Desire's near-Hegelian symmetry is odd proof that two wrong-headed people can make something so right.

The thesis is Blanche DuBois (Lydia Mackay), modern American drama’s most infuriating heroine: skittish, chatty, passive-aggressive, defensive, snide, frail, self-pitying, predatory. When she enters aflutter, inappropriately dressed in virginal white, she comes off as judgmental and rude. How can we tolerate her?

Enter the antithesis, her brother-in-law Stanley (Clay Yocum). He’s the prototype of a lout, the guy you always see on Cops: a bowler in a wife-beater who gets drunk playing cards with his crummy pals. If Blanche is all fake manners and petty deceptions, Stanley’s a destroyer of illusions, a thoughtless monster. Together, they form a synthesis.

Or at least, they should.

In Contemporary Theatre's staging of the Tennessee Williams classic, the sexual tension between the two never takes root. There’s nothing really bad about the production, but not much to distinguish it, either. As sultry Southern Gothic goes, it’s tepid stuff — Gossip Girl, not Grand Guignol.

Blanche is an easy role to ruin, and while Mackay doesn’t (she’s often good), she only comes fully to life in her scenes with Mitch (Russell DeGrazier), a simpleton who underestimates the mileage on her — she’s passed 100,000 and reset. Stanley needs to be a knuckle-dragging psychopath, the kind you’d believe his wife, Stella (an excellent Jessica Wiggers), would stick with because he was great in the sack. But Yocum plays him as more Cagney than Brando; he’s mean, but without the animal strut.

Still, you can’t overlook how breathtaking the language can be. “A woman’s charm is 50 percent illusion,” Blanche coos, while extinguishing a light-bulb because she “will not be looked at in this merciless glare.”

It’s a wonder more drag queens don’t “do” Blanche — she has a gay man’s sense for flamboyant drama.

Director Rene Moreno unearths the comedy in the play, but he errs with the train effects (too Midwest locomotive, not enough urban trolley) and a faux Alex North score that, ironically, is more overheated than the performances. Ultimately, this Streetcar doesn’t stay on track.

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Related stories

• Dallas Voice’s 2008 theater actors of the year (Dec. 29, 2008)
• Dallas Voice’s Top 10 2008 Dallas-Fort Worth theater productions (Dec. 26, 2008)
• Theater Review: Zanna, Don’t! (Aug. 18, 2008)

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• Arts > Fine Arts > Theater > Musicals
• Arts > Fine Arts > Theater > Plays