Reviews 2000
Reviews 2000
✭✭✩✩✩
by music and lyrics by Joey Miller, book and direction by Brad Fraser
Canadian Stage Company, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto
September 28-November 18, 2000
“Thom Allison is Fabulous – Too Bad about the Musical”
"Outrageous", the new musical based on the 1977 film of the same name with book and lyrics by Brad Fraser and music by Joey Miller, is artistically such a mess that it really needs to be totally reconceived. That this Canadian Stage production succeeds at all is almost entirely due to the brilliant performance of Thom Allison as Robin Turner, the female impersonator, the role played by Craig Russell in the film. He is so fine in his singing and acting, not to mention his hilarious spot-on impersonations, you wish the creators had junked the idea of adapting the film and instead built a new show just to showcase his talent. As it is, the show comes close to undermining any sense of exhilaration we feel from Allison's performance.
The primary difficulty is Fraser's book. He has adapted virtually the entire script of the film. As I thought everyone knew, the source material for a musical or opera has be streamlined since the music necessarily makes the work longer. Sondheim's "A Little Night Music" is a perfect example of a musical based on a film which has retained the sense of Bergman's screenplay but dispensed with numerous incidents in it. By trying to retain all the incidents in the film, Fraser's book has a number of extraneous characters, songs for those characters which do not move the story forward and, worst of all, rapid, telegraph-style dialogue used entirely to make plot points and not to aid in characterization.
The second main problem is that, unlike the film where the story of the schizophrenic Liza Conner served as a subplot to the Robin Turner plot, here Fraser has given the Liza plot so much weight that it doesn't just balance but tends to overwhelm the Robin plot. Fraser has structured the work so the Robin and Liza are the dual foci of the work, with events in their lives played simultaneously or in rapid alternation. As a result, for every up we feel from the story of Robin's rise from hairdresser to professional entertainer, there is a down from the story of Liza's bouts of delusion, difficulties with family and friends, and loss of her baby. This alternation of moods is so thorough that we ultimately don't wish to commit our interest to either story. Fraser's director's notes claim that this show will present "no easy endings and so simple answers", but, in fact, it does just that. Robin's impersonations, rather than any drugs or therapy, can somehow drive away Liza's imagined persecutor, the "Bonecrusher", so once they are together again at the end, everything is fine.
Despite the unwieldy book, Fraser's lyrics are alternately abrasive and clever especially in the song "Karen Black" and in the big production number for the Joan of Arc musical Robin stars in in New York. An irritant, however, is Fraser's habit of interrupting almost every song with bits of dialogue, effectively reducing the emotional momentum of the musical numbers. Joey Miller's music is often quite amusing in imitating various styles of music from the 1970s. At times it can be as trite as a TV commercial as in the opening number 'Carnival Country" or deliberately unpleasant as in Martin's heavy metal song. At others, it flows out in memorable melodies as in “My Own Voice”, "No More Bad Dreams" and "Change". Unfortunately, overamplification often causes words to be lost.
David Boechler's unattractive, angular set looks far more appropriate for a German Expressionist play than a musical set in the 1970s. To some extent Bonnie Beecher's lighting and the colourful exuberance of Boechler's costumes makes up for this. His outfits for Robin and his two drag-queen friends are especially witty. Sergio Trujillo is credited with the choreography, but the show is so preoccupied with getting in all the plot that there is no room for any extended dance number to showcase his imagination.
The actors are all talented and well cast, but Thom Allison is the only one who seems most fully in command. He even makes Fraser's dialogue seem less choppy. Because he is of mixed parentage, Allison's excellent impersonations include an addicted Billie Holliday and a hyper Tina Turner along with the standards-Mae West, Marilyn Monroe, Carol Channing and Judy Garland. Fraser even makes Allison speak some lines in the voices of famous actresses, but the lines pass by too quickly to identify the voice. Lorretta Bailey characterizes Liza primarily through her lovely singing and facial expression since she often rushes her spoken lines regardless of meaning.
The other eight actors play multiple roles, many of which could usefully be cut. Chief among these is Tim Howar as Martin, Liza's psychotic friend. Fraser controls the mood of the show so poorly that Martin is often the butt of humour. It's odd to say the least that we should be asked to laugh at someone with a mental illness when a main character is schizophrenic. Except for one song, Susan Henley has little chance to make Liza's mother anything more than the caricature Fraser has written. Tamara Bernier's talent is pretty much wasted in the role of Liza's friend, Anne, since Fraser gives her no background and little to do. Tim Sell is fine as Robin's boyfriend-manager, but he makes his character so unlikable that it's hard to see why Robin is attracted to him. Timothy Murphy and Ed Sahely are very funny as Robin's two drag queen friends, though the entire section about how they encourage Robin to try drag is far too long. Karen Leblanc as Liza's social worker and later as the lesbian co-owner of a New York leather bar, is given a cardboard figure in the first role but does manage to make the second character and her hetero fling believable. Sharron Matthews as the other co-owner of the bar does her best to make her stereotyped role, the diesel dyke with a heart of gold, a more rounded character.
"Outrageous" has the potential so be a solid, successful musical if only the writer/director Fraser could distance himself more from the material and find a more elegant way to tell the story. Liza's narration from her diary which helps abridge the action in the second part could also have been used in the first. Or onstage-offstage analogies could have been used throughout but to enhance not undermine each other. The obvious parallel for this story, involving a would-be performer living with a would-be writer living in unenlightened times and losing a baby, is "Cabaret". Perhaps, Fraser wished to avoid that model though there is much he could learn from its economy of presentation. As it is, the primary reason to see "Outrageous" is Thom Allison--a star whose career is ready for blast off.
©Christopher Hoile
Photo: Thom Allison as Robin as Marilyn Monroe. ©2000 Canadian Stage.
2000-10-10
Outrageous