Friday, July 4, 2008

Theater reviews: My Boyfriend, the Stripper and High School Musical

By Arnold Wayne Jones of Dallas Voice

Myself aside, I can’t imagine there will be much crossover between the audiences of High School Musical, a deafening teenybopper confection that screeched into Fair Park this week, and My Boyfriend, the Stripper, a "play" where the apparent single criterion for casting is that the all-male cast consent to dropping trou once or twice.

I’m a defender of full-frontal onstage under most circumstances — how many men aren’t? — but the problem with Stripper is that it pits your critical judgment against your libido… and judgment wins.

The “script” is allegedly “written” by Ronnie Larsen, he of Making Porn. Larsen apparently has a much different idea about writing that I do. There should be plot, pacing, character, dialogue — and, presumably, all in doses that don’t make you wince.

Strike one.

Stripper is about almost exactly what its title implies: A middle-class businessman meets an exotic dancer-slash-porn actor-slash-photographer at his birthday party and they begin dating. His friends sniff that he’s slumming … and promptly begin to pose for the stripper’s nude photo sessions. In between the disrobing, the characters (including a pretentious college professor, a trollish alcoholic, a sensitive grad student and a nelly… well, I never figured out what he does except swish) pontificate about gay rights and how flawed the gay community is — including how ridiculous it is to attend gay plays that have no benefits beyond male nudity. (I am not making that up.) The lack of irony is mind-numbing.

Strike two.

We’ll leave out the names of the cast members, none of whom benefit from being in the show. Only two — the protagonist and the student — have real acting chops. The stripper, saddled with a thick Latin accent, is virtually incomprehensible most of the time. He’s Olivier, though, next to the prof, who stammers over his under-rehearsed lines like Dustin Hoffman reciting “Who’s on First?” in Rain Man. It’s painfully uncomfortable to watch him.

Strike three.

I have a suspicion about why Larsen inserts so many self-righteous lectures and gestures toward character development: Obscenity laws. See, a work of art isn’t “obscene” if it demonstrates some moral, educational or other socially redeeming quality … which is why so many ‘50s-era naked film romps had people playing volleyball or conducting anatomy lessons. Larsen cleaves to this outdated thinking like a drowning man to a life-vest, hoping it will prop him up and save him from death.

But what about the sharks, Ronnie? And hypothermia? You miss the point of theater by single-mindedly justifying your existence without any attempt to entertain.

OK, OK, there is nudity, and perhaps you get what you pay for on that score. No one bolted during intermission, as I wanted to do. But this isn’t theater; it’s a peep show out in the open.

At least I stuck around for act 2 of Stripper, which is more than I can say of High School Musical. At intermish barely an hour in, I politely bee-lined for the parking lot.

Never having seen the Disney Channel movie on which this touring show is based, I can only speculate about the plot. Certainly I did not hear it, as the sound system at the Music Hall at Fair Park — and the shrill voices of the cast — prevented the songs from registering on all but the local canine population.

Some of the cast is appealing, especially the leading male and female. And there’s definitely gay appeal, if you consider a flamboyant drama queen mincing around entertainment; personally, I kept waiting for the jocks to beat the living shit out of him.

But there were so many kids and tweens there, it’s obvious he target audience is a much younger theater set than the usual Dallas Summer Musicals’ season subscriber base. (I haven’t seen so many booster seats provided to an audience since Wicked’s out-of-town tryout in Munchkinland.) Zac Efron junkies would be better off catching Hairspray on cable then trying to decipher this cacophonous mess.

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