69. ROCOCO ROUGE
The
promotional package for ROCOCO ROUGE, the latest “rouge” offering from artistic
director Austin McCormick and his Company XIV (pronounced by its letters rather
than as the number 14), invites you to “a titillating evening of decadent
divertissement, featuring opera divas, can-can girls, dancing boys, live music,
circus, ballet, burlesque, and much more. Sip a delicious cocktail whilst you experience
a thrillingly unique fusion of nightlife and theatre.” While neither especially
titillating nor decadent, the show delivers on all the other counts, and offers
a pleasant enough divertissement for theatregoers seeking pure escapism. Its immediate
predecessor, last year’s NUTCRACKER ROUGE, which received a Drama Desk
nomination as a Unique Theatrical Experience, had the benefit, minimal as it
was, of its source, the NUTCRACKER SUITE, to tie its disparate parts together and provide
continuity for those familiar with the story. No such luck with ROCOCO
ROUGE, which, while it uses several similar performance routines, is merely a
succession of songs, acrobatic acts, and dance numbers, connected by the
singing and patter of the very talented mistress of ceremonies, Shelly Watson.
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| ROCOCO ROUGE company. |
The show is done cabaret style in an unnamed downstairs venue at 428 Lafayette
Street, located in the Colonnades, that row of neoclassical, early 1830s
buildings directly across from the Public Theatre. The front room cum lobby has
a bar where you can have a drink before entering the 100-seat theatre at the
rear. Even if you aren’t thirsty when you arrive, you’ll have an
opportunity to order from a pretty cocktail waitress at your table, where
you’ll likely be seated with strangers. (Some patrons sit on small love seats.)
And if your throat remains parched, not to worry, since the show takes two
thirst-quenching intermissions. Truthfully, the only need for these “short
breaks,” as Ms. Watson calls them, is to sell more drinks; their downside is 1)
they stretch the event out to nearly two hours (half an hour longer than advertised), and 2) the intermission music
(much of it jazz recordings featuring classical stylists like Ella Fitzgerald
and Eartha Kitt) is so loud it’s like being at a wedding or bar mitzvah where you
have to scream to have anything like a conversation.
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| Shelly Watson (center) and company. Photo: Phillip Van Nostrand. |
Hanging on one of the
theatre’s black walls is a huge Moulin Rouge poster of slinky black chorus girl
leader Lisette Malidor in nude silhouette. The stage curtain itself combines
colored images of bewigged personages from the time of France’s Louis XIV, from
whose dissolute late 18th-century reign the company takes its inspiration,
combined with a black and white, painted panorama of 19th-century French chorus
girls. Among these charming young women, some of them doing the can can, are a
few who think little of displaying their furry nether regions. For shame.
Actually, this curtain, which also includes a nude man lying on his back with
his equipment in the hand of one of the naughty can can girls, is perhaps the
most erotic thing in ROCOCO ROUGE; Ms. Watson promises “debauchery and nakedity”
but the results are limp in both zones.
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| Courtney Giannone (standing) and company. Photo: Phillip Van Nostrand. |
Zane Pihlstrom’s minimalist set is
mainly two Austrian curtains, one upstage, one down, lit with
conventionally smoky, mood-making effects by Jeannette Yew. Several small, standing, crystal chandelier-light lamps line the downstage area, and a spiral staircase is located up left. Mr. Pihlstrom’s
costumes continue the company tradition of eroticizing 18th-century high
fashion by combining familiar elements but stripping them down to reveal as
much flesh as possible. For those first encountering the company’s work they’ll
be surprising; if you’ve seen an earlier show, like NUTCRACKER ROUGE, however, the novelty will
be gone.
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| Davon Rainey, Shelly Watson. Photo: Phillip Van Nostrand. |
Ms. Watson, who brings to mind a combination of Bette Midler and
Mae West, is a roly-poly presence bedecked in a series of truly fanciful wigs
and miniskirted costumes consisting of imaginatively adorned corsets, bustiers,
and panniers. She makes an excellent female version of the Emcee made
famous in the musical CABARET, but, despite her satirically insinuating manner,
her lines are neither especially off-color nor funny. More
charismatic attitude than scintillating wit, she nevertheless capably anchors the production as she wanders through the audience, mic in hand, with her gently
provocative comic commentary and very impressive singing, which shifts
effortlessly from operatic arias (in French and Italian) to contemporary hip-hop and jazz. As expected,
several ringside spectators get her close-up treatment (I was referred to as a
“silver-haired devil” as she put an arm around me), and I thank the gods she
didn’t plant her lipstick on my balding pate, as they do to shiny-headed
plutocrats in those old movie nightclub scenes.
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| Katrina Cunningham. Photo: Phillip Van Nostrand. |
The show itself is a
succession of familiar routines, newly staged and choreographed by Mr.
McCormick, but not especially original, nor particularly distinct from one
another. The dance numbers feature several attractive women and two men, all of
them in scanty costumes showing lots of butt flesh, but there’s no actual
nudity. The men wear sequined codpieces and the few women who bare their
breasts do so only with pasties stuck firmly in place. G-strings dominate and,
as usual, will cause the wedgie-conscious to wonder how people can wear those
things without constantly tugging at them. The choreography, much of it set to classical
operatic arias, is filled with writhing, twisting, thrusting movements that
express feelings but don’t particularly reflect the lyrics (at least not those
in English); aside from the sight of lightly clad, lithe, and muscular young
bodies behaving in the throes of presumed passion or jealousy or whatnot, the dances are in no way
salacious, more’s the pity. And since the company’s two male dancers (Davon Rainey and Steven
Trumon Gray), for all their low body fat and trim physiques, are usually
dressed in women’s corsets, it may require special tastes to appreciate their
sensual appeal.
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| Laura Careless. Photo: Phillip Van Nostrand. |
The dancers are all quite capable of performing Mr.
McCormick’s “baroque choreography,” as the company calls it, a combination of
classical ballet and contemporary jazz dancing, and there’s even a
semi-flamenco piece, based on “Habanera” from CARMEN, performed by Mr. Rainey, who also does a bizarrely incongruous dance, wearing flaming drag, with a red
sequined gown and 1920’s style headpiece, while Ms. Watson belts “Is That All There Is?” It
might be noted that the slender Mr. Rainey, who has a tiny waist any
figure-conscious woman might envy, bears a striking resemblance to Lisette
Malidor, whose poster I mentioned earlier.
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| ROCOCO ROUGE company. Photo: Phillip Van Nostrand. |
The dances include pas de deux and solos (Laura Careless’s is a standout) as well as solo songs, the two principal
singers (apart from Ms. Watson) being the lovely brunette Brett Umlauf and the
voluptuous Katrina Cunningham, whose renditions of pop tunes, such as Beyoncé’s
“Drunken Love” and Brittany Spears’s “Toxic” (titles my theatre companion provided), have a Norah Jones vibe;
I admit, however, to having had trouble making out the slurred lyrics. Allison
Ulrich proves a deft aerialist on the hanging hoop, especially when she’s
paired with Mr. Gray and they have to perform very close to the nearby lighting
instruments. She's also no slouch when it comes to pole dancing. Courtney Giannone performs on the cyr wheel, but why she’s been
asked to hide her arresting looks by wearing not only an unflattering hairdo
but a drawn-on mustache is anybody’s guess. Rob Mastrianni is the talented
guitarist who accompanies several numbers.
ROCOCO ROUGE isn’t up to the
standards of NUTCRACKER ROUGE, which included several of the same artists on
and offstage. It needs something other than atmosphere to unify its parts, and
the inclusion of some more daringly erotic material would go a long way to
bringing the necessary rouge to audiences’ cheeks.
