“They
Had Faces Then”
Without the brief program note accompanying The Confession of Lily Dare, Charles Busch’s campily pitch-perfect, affectionately
nostalgic spoof of pre-Code movies of the early 1930s, it’s unlikely that
anyone other than hardcore film buffs would be able to identify such influences
on it as The Sin of
Madelon Claudet, Frisco Jenny, and Madame X. One
might also toss the 1936 post-Code San Francisco into
the blender, as well as a passel of women’s films from those bygone days.
What emerges captures the sentimental
contrivances of those largely forgotten black and white weepies and somehow,
while making hilarious mockery of their histrionic extravagances, actually
manages to tug at our cynical tear ducts.
 |
| Kendal Sparks, Nancy Anderson. All photos: Carol Rosegg. |
Busch (Vampire
Lesbians of Sodom, The Allergist’s
Wife), of course, is the master drag artist cum playwright, who has done
this kind of thing before (just check out the vivid program covers of the plays
on his website), if
not always quite as effectively. The multi-scened play, crammed onto the Cherry
Lane Theatre’s intimate stage, deploys a decorative yet neutral set designed by
B.T. Whitehall to capture San Francisco’s old-time ambiance.
Bookending the script are scenes at the grave of Lily
Dare (Busch), to whose resting place, located beside the Golden Gate Bridge—illuminated
on the upstage wall—come her best friends, Emmy Lou (Nancy Anderson), a blonde former
hooker with a heart of gold, and Mickey (Kendal Sparks), Lily's faithful gay accompanist.
Hence the setup for the flashback of her life that occupies the bulk of the
two-hour, two-act comedy.
 |
| Kendal Sparks, Charles Busch, Christopher Borg, Nancy Anderson, Howard McGillin. |
As the episodic action speeds by, displaying the arc
of Lily’s flamboyant career, we watch her arrival in San Francisco as a Swiss convent-raised,
operatically talented, innocent teen orphan. Taken in by her loud, ostentatiously
brassy Aunt Rosalie (Jennifer Van Dyck), madam of a flourishing Barbary Coast
brothel, she meets the aforesaid Emmy Lou and Mickey. Also there are Blackie
Lambert (Howard McGillin), a silver-haired, rich, elegant, but admittedly shady
dude, and the sweet young bookkeeper, Louis (Christopher Borg), by whom she
becomes pregnant before he loses his head, literally, in the great earthquake
of 1906.
There follow Lily’s travails as an unwed mother,
forced to give up her baby daughter to the wealthy Dr. Carlton (Borg) and his
wife (Van Dyck). Then there’s the frame-up that sends her to prison, as well as
her two careers, one as Mandalay, a swaggering, smoky-voiced cabaret singer in
the Marlene Dietrich/Mae West mold, the other as Treasure Jones, a tough
brothel madam.
 |
| Jennifer Van Dyck, Christopher Borg, Charles Busch. |
When the Depression crashes and things get rough, she
commits a murder for which she’s sentenced to be hanged. Meanwhile, her
daughter, Louise (Van Dyck), becomes a famous opera singer, obsessed with finding
her birth mother. Lily, however, is too ashamed to let her know the truth. Naturally,
this precipitates a visit to Lily’s prison cell only minutes before she’s
scheduled to meet the hangman.
Like its celluloid origins, the material is egregiously corny but, played by these terrific thespians with a matchless mixture of comedy and compassion, you actually feel something stirring beneath the laughter.
Like its celluloid origins, the material is egregiously corny but, played by these terrific thespians with a matchless mixture of comedy and compassion, you actually feel something stirring beneath the laughter.
 |
| Howard McGillin, Charles Busch. |
Longtime Busch collaborator Carl Andress has put together
a delectable production for Primary Stages, with fine period costumes by Rachel Townsend. Responsibility
for Busch’s own, often over-the-top, creations, though, is in the talented
hands of Jessica Jahn, complemented by the marvelous wigs of Katherine Carr.
Busch warbles an original torch song, “Pirate Joe,” in the pseudo-Kurt Weil
mode, by Tom Judson, who also arranged Busch’s throaty, more spoken-than-sung
approach to the old Ted Lewis standby, “In a Shanty in Old Shantytown.”
 |
| Nancy Anderson, Charles Busch. |
But what really weaves the heavily plotted yet often
sketch-like fabric into theatrical spun gold are the insanely apt performances,
each a comically priceless contribution. It starts with Sparks’s grounded, and
thankfully, not effete Mickey; moves on to the colorfully upbeat rhythms of
Anderson’s sweet-natured Emmy Lou; and steps higher into a perfectly limned
caricature of McGillin’s sybaritic—and, later, down-beaten—Blackie.
 |
| Jennifer Van Dyck. |
It then goes through the roof with the wildly diverse portraits
of Van Dyck (behold another Tracey Ullman) and Borg, both displaying devilishly
clownish versatility. Finally, soaring into humor heaven is Busch, with his trunkful
of facial and eye-batting tics, drop-dead funny inflections, artificial
Hollywood diction, leading lady attitudinizing, and subterranean emotionality. Watch
closely and you’ll see traces of one cinematic femme icon after the other—from Crawford
to Davis to Stanwyck to Dietrich and so on—in his cornucopia of filmic
mannerisms.
 |
| Charles Busch. |
I confess to having had a great time at The Confession of Lily Dare. I daresay
you probably will, too.
Cherry Lane Theatre
38 Commerce St. NYC
Through March 5
