OH DEAR…
Event theatre! New from NY! It got Tony and Pulitzer nominations, and smart Broadway people called it “heartwarming: and “best crafted and exactingly directed” (though one briefly brave but finally panicky critic says “silly, nasty, tasteless and in the end, good theater”). Its author is Cole Escola and its star Mason Alexander Park , both defined by him-or-their selves as nonbinary: though honestly, despite the huge black crinoline and the finale spangle-glittering mini, every gesture , yell and galumphing pratfall presented by Park is 100% unmistakeably bloke.
At 80 minutes it is, as several London audience members observed quite loudly as we left, an hour too long. The premise is simple: Mary Todd Lincoln is an unhappy, drunken, thwarted wife of a President (we’re supposed not to name Lincoln) in the throes of the American Civil War. She wants to be a cabaret star. Her acting coach is – wait for it! – John Wilkes Booth. So guess what happens. Her husband is a semi-closeted gay who gets blow-jobs under the Oval Office desk from his aide, and at one stage launches into a screaming-queen row with Booth . What that fine actor Giles Terera is doing in this show I cannot think.
As a fifteen-minute sketch on an unchallenging comedy show it’d be OK. Park is skilled at what he does, which is low-comedy drag with an unconscionable number of gay-fellatio jokes, at which the audience feels uncomfortably compelled to giggle. There were very few real loud laughs, though, certainly at the matinee I went to: perhaps nobody was fully drunk. But hey, I suppose that when a historic President gets assassinated in a theatre it is only fair for his wife to be character-assassinated a couple of centuries later, albeit with a little final crypto-feminist queer-ally speechlet about her frustration, in which she compares herself to a tectonic plate rising from being deeply crushed to be a mountain.
The subsequent cabaret supermix redeemed it a little, and won the second mouse. Just. But knowing how ‘hot’ this piece of dreary rubbish was on Broadway, I left a lot more worried about America’s future than before. Certainly needed a soothing few hours’ application of Sondheim afterwards, just to repair the special relationship.
trafalgartheatre.com to 25 April
rating 2
theatreCat 