219.
THE TRIBUTE ARTIST
Oy.
The arctic cold, the never-ending snow storms, my aching hip, the succession of
mostly mediocre shows I’ve had to sit through lately. At least on Tuesday I was
heading for the comforts of an evening of comic make believe in the usually
uproarious company of Charles Busch and Julie Halston in Mr. Busch’s new play,
THE TRIBUTE ARTIST, produced by Primary Stages at 59E59. Two hours and 15
minutes (including an intermission) after the show began, I had yet another oy
to add to my list of woes.
I suppose one could write an essay
on the play’s preoccupation with the transmutability of identity but, even if
THE TRIBUTE ARTIST, energetically directed by Carl Andress, were a work of
intellectual comedic genius, which it’s not, that wouldn’t make it seem any the
less something that, both in its script and high-pitched performances, made me
feel I was visiting the kind of comedy that used to tour summer stock theatres
or end up on dinner theatre bills after it had worn out its welcome on Broadway. The characters are cartoons, the
set (by Anna Louizos) is eye-catching, the costumes (by Gregory Dale) are
colorful, the acting is broad and brassy, the jokes are sassy zingers with a
heavy dose of (often gay) naughtiness, and the plot is contrived enough to give
its star and author all the opportunities he wishes to flame around doing
impersonations of female show biz icons. Nevertheless, despite the comic stardust that
normally trails Mr. Busch (and Ms. Halston), their enthusiastic efforts here
are wasted on a tired farce that sets up a silly premise and fails to make it
real enough or its stakes high enough to grab our attention lapels and never
let us go.
Mr. Busch plays Jimmy, a Las Vegas “tribute
artist” (he rejects the term “drag queen), who has been fired from his gig
(younger audiences weaned on Rihanna and Beyoncé aren’t interested in his
silver screen goddesses), locked out of his apartment
by his boyfriend, and forced to move back to New York where he rents a room in
the luxurious Greenwich Village townhouse of a glamorously eccentric, aging
fashion designer, Adriana. She’s played by Cynthia Harris with a deep voice, extravagant
manners, and high-toned accent that bring to mind the fancy movie stars, like Tallulah,
Hepburn, Crawford, and Davis, of whom Jimmy has made a career impersonating. After
some lengthy exposition that tells us that Adriana expects to die soon, that
her house is worth $12 million, that all her personal information is in a
notebook, and that she has no doctor, lawyer, or personal banker, she pops off quietly
and Jimmy and his best friend, the lesbian real estate broker Rita (Ms.
Halston), quickly decide on a scheme to pass the body off as somebody else and
for Jimmy to assume her personality, sell the house, and split the proceeds with Rita.
The
perfect crime soon reveals its imperfections when Adriana’s whiningly
complaining niece Christina (Mary Bacon) and her transgender daughter/son
Rachel a.k.a. Oliver (Keira Keeley) show up, having learned of the planned sale, with the
financially challenged Christina (who lives off stolen credit cards) rightfully
declaring that she is now the legal owner of the house, and has no interest in
sharing whatever it sells for. Further, Oliver, using Facebook, friends his late aunt’s much
younger boyfriend, Rodney (Jonathan Walker), who hadn’t seen Adriana in 20
years; a conniving sleazeball himself (he traffics in body
parts), he shows up to see what he can squeeze from the situation for
himself.
With these elements in place, the
play proceeds to work out who gets what, as well as who sleeps
with whom, and all comes to a suitably neat conclusion, with a comeuppance for
the undeserving. It’s not really necessary to quibble about the relative
implausibility of the proceedings; Mr. Busch does a neat enough job of setting
up his characters and situations to make them believable enough, but the play,
once it begins chugging forward, does so in fits and starts, with too much time
devoted to trivialities of character, narrative backstories, and comedic dialogue that too frequently
falls as flat as Mr. Busch without his falsies. I don’t deny the occasional
laughter in the house, some of it fairly strong; it just seemed far less
frequent than a play of this sort requires, and also far more polite.
Mr. Busch does his standard female
impersonation shtick, with bits and pieces of the famous stars emerging from
Jimmy's mouth almost as if he were not so much a person as a Frankenstein’s monster
made up of film quotes and accents with no voice of his own. Ms. Halston, in
one of the biggest laughs, is reprimanded for annotating his references, so
that no one will miss who Jimmy's channeling. There’s definitely an audience for such
campiness, but it’s been done better and funnier before, particularly by Mr. Busch, and there’s little
here that seems new. Mr. Busch’s acting, like that of all the others, is entertainingly
one-dimensional, in keeping with the nature of the plot; however, over two
hours of this sort of stuff makes you want to pay tribute not to THE TRIBUTE
ARTIST but to all those other current writers who know that, if your material
doesn’t demand it, you must bring that curtain down after an hour and a half. Without
an intermission.
