Heaven in Your Pocket

A Kansas City nightclub, sassy singing ladies, cowboy boots, and Southern accents – who wouldn’t expect a rip roarin’ good time from this new musical, buoyantly titled Heaven in Your Pocket? But with its unremarkable story, mundane and mopey dialogue, and pseudo-country music, this show won’t do much to lift your spirits.


Reviewed by Sarah Krasnow

Stage right, a spotlit woman raises her dyed-red, mulleted head, and in an Oklahoman drawl invokes the metaphor of life as a road, whose unplanned detours can make the ride a little bumpy, but which eventually leads us where we were always meant to go. This Southwesterner is Arlene (Rebecca Spencer), a hardheaded single mom and country singer, prepping us for the story of her latest detour with her brassy best friend, Mary Celeste (Lisa Asher), and ingénue daughter, Kay Lee (Pheonix Vaughn), in tow. The three gals are natives of Heaven, OK, en route to a gig in Nashville, but who end up at a defunct Kansas City nightclub, willed to Kay Lee by her absent, and now deceased, father. Finding little besides the man’s most recent girlfriend and some tattered scenery, the tuneful trio swoop down on the ramshackle building and try to glam it up: it’s like To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, only without the drag queens.

The actors keep their accents thick and their energy high as they bustle about, one-liners like “I’d hate to end up on Oprah for the wrong reasons” and silly political references trying to keep the mood light. But with the characters' constant rehashing of the past and fretting over the future, especially via dialogue as fresh as a frozen burrito, there’s little to keep us optimistic or, for that matter, interested. Even the country music is missing its twang, taking a piano-heavy route that is more reliant on ballads than boot-stomping. Two lively scenes—one a campy, low-budget commercial shoot for the club and the other a doo-wop musical number that reveals sequins and scarves beneath choir robes—are like candy in contrast with the bland material; they’re not any more nutritious, but at least they have some flavor.

With affection for the Oklahoma town in mind, Barbara Kingsolver wrote Pigs in Heaven, and Three Dog Night wrote “Well I’ve never been to Heaven…”, but to hear it from Arlene, Mary Celeste, and Kay Lee, there’s nothing heavenly about it. Rather, it’s a Nowheresville speck on a map, a Podunk place people try to get away from or slink back to when they’re down on their luck. For the audience, Heaven in Your Pocket is about as meaningful as Heaven, OK: neither a celestial nor hellish experience, it’s something closer to Purgatory.

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Heaven in Your Pocket (2hrs., 15-minute intermission)
New York Musical Theatre Festival
45th Street Theatre, 354 W. 45th St
Tues., Sept. 23, 4:30 p.m.; Sun., Sept. 28, 1 p.m.
Tickets (212) 352-3101 or (866) 811-4111: $20
www.theatermania.com or www.nymf.org.

Fringe/Cycle

The in-the-flesh thrill of vaudeville is brought to life by Cycle, in which a troupe of players guide the suicidal Charlotte through the make-or-break process of finding success on the stage. It's a string of little adventures, but they pop like firecrackers.


Reviewed by Sarah Krasnow

Oh, what some fedoras can do. Just add a droopy tutu, some character shoes, a trunk bedecked with stickers, and the swellest hoofers in town, and you’ve got the in-the-flesh thrill that is vaudeville. Cycle opens on a troupe of vaudevillians, fated to ricochet through time whenever a member flouts a “showbiz superstition” (uttering the name of the Scottish play is no joke). Unlatching their prop trunk, they find a sleeping young woman named Charlotte inside. Charlotte’s hapless, humdrum life has driven her to contemplate jumping out the window, and today—her birthday—is her last chance to find success. What follows is a string of tiny adventures that go off like firecrackers as the players guide Charlotte though the make-or-break process of seeking success on the stage. The flurrying scenes, steeped in old-timey Americana, remind us of some national traits more classic than apple pie, like our tendency to look for shortcuts (the dream of landing a Hollywood career overnight), all dished out via vaudeville, that great American entertainment.

Backed by piano and accordion, twirling canes and dropping retro slang, the versatile actors dazzle us with jokes, violin, song, and dance, their personalities as complementary as the harmonies in their rendition of “All of Me.” They form a family, but not of the Aristocrats tradition: wholesome and tireless, they just want to do their act and help Charlotte back on the horse (or in this case, red Schwinn bike). In the role of Charlotte, playwright Rose Courtney’s flustered likeability makes us believe she’s not multitalented, though the illusion disappears as soon as she takes her final, well-deserved bow.

Watching Cycle inside the little Deluxe tent at South Street Seaport, a dance party to the right and the bigger-budget stuff to the left, this solid jewel of a play within the frothy nightlife glitter perfectly mirrors the South Street Seaport experience, with its cobblestones smothered by chain stores. The genuine, delightful Cycle transports us through time, allowing us to avoid the commercial and just absorb the joy.

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Cycle (1 hr. 45 mins.; no intermission)
Venue #4 at the Deluxe @ Spiegelworld (Pier 17, South Street Seaport)
Tickets: $15 (866-468-7619)
www.fringenyc.org
Sat., Aug. 23 @ 9:15 pm

Cold Storage

The provocative questions about life and death raised in Ronald Ribman’s 1976 dark comedy, Cold Storage, leave an audience pondering, long after the curtain has come down, the eventual descent of their own, figurative curtain. But the play’s two hours of conversation between patients at a cancer hospital, unceasing and yet with volumes more unsaid, requires acting and directing precise enough to find movement and meaning in the dense dialogue. Unfortunately, director and star Richmond Shepard’s inability to provide either amounts to a terminal diagnosis for this show.

Reviewed by Sarah Krasnow

Richmond Shepard plays Mr. Parmegian, a dying old man, most of whose insides have been snipped out or rearranged. Wheelchair-bound, hooked to a catheter, and with nothing to do but lounge on the hospital’s rooftop garden, he has reason to despair. However, his detached life view (even if you work hard, you’ll still die; the secret to the universe is there is no point to anything) indicates that he has rarely sweat the details. Dan Burkarth plays the other patient on the rooftop, Richard Landau, a sober, 40-ish art investment advisor in for exploratory surgery. Trying without much success to relax in the garden (as his tense grip on a candy bar suggests), Landau has no interest in conversation. But that can’t stop champion chatterer Mr. Parmegian from talking, and talking, and talking about silly anecdotes, his past, his philosophy on life and death, or Landau’s wife’s varicose veins. Parmegian opines, Landau reacts, and little else occurs. The way they communicate should therefore tell us all we need to know about them, but this production’s direction is too unfocused and the actors’ delivery too unvaried to be revealing. We end up watching the same back-and-forth ad nauseum: Parmegian talks, Landau interjects, Parmegian announces a personal philosophy, repeat. There are gems of humor and nuggets of wisdom here, but when it’s all the audience can do to pay attention, we don’t have the energy to mine for them.

At the end of Act II, a spotlight shift to Landau finally allows the play to move forward, with the recounting of a concrete, coherent story about his family’s deportation from Nazi Germany. Now, for the first time, Shepard listens and responds to his fellow performer, and Burkarth lets his (as Parmegian puts it) “surface veneer” melt enough to let out a few chuckles. At last, we get it: the shared icy experience of death and loss connects two people, however mismatched. Terminal Parmegian is headed quite literally for cold storage, and Landau, a victim of tragedy, suffers in his own kind of cold storage, the temperature dropping further as he faces possible illness. But as Shepard’s underdeveloped take on Parmegian and Burkarth’s unchanging seriousness as Landau fail to illuminate Ribman’s subtler points, we miss the connection until far too late.

As Landau leaves the roof at the close of Act I, Parmegian calls after him, “Be interesting!”, and we wonder why Shepard hasn’t taken his own character’s advice. At the close of Act II, Parmegian says to Landau, after they agree to meet on the roof again, “I promise you a very interesting day.” Now we believe him, but wish it hadn’t taken two hours of unstructured jabber before we did.

Cold Storage (2 hours, 1 intermission)
Richmond Shepard Theatre (309 East 26th Street)Tickets (212-684-2690): $20, students and seniors $10Performances (through 8/30): Wed. – Sat. @ 8pm

MITF: Prince Trevor Amongst the Elephants

Prince Trevor Amongst the Elephants has all the staples of over-the-top parody: bawdiness, goofy names, a little commander-in-chief bashing, and modern slang injected into “period” dialogue. But the play’s special brand of comedy is in matching Shakespearean reference and iambic pentameter with gay themes and full-frontal (male) nudity. English majors, Mel Brooks fans, anyone who can handle live nakedness, lend Cross-eyed Bear Productions your ears (and eyes), and come away thoroughly entertained.

Reviewed by Sarah Krasnow

Prince Trevor Amongst the Elephants builds off a fairy tale foundation: an evil king, a banished hero, love that transcends social barriers, and so on. Here, Prince Trevor represents our banished hero, the ribald twist being that he was kicked out of his kingdom for being gay and is now questing to reunite with his true love, Toby, the stable boy. Along the way, he and his nymphomaniacal servant pick up some new friends: Dymphna the Slut, Daniel the Rustic Feralist, Lynetta the (ahem) accommodating lady-in-waiting, and the Elephants of Style, played by actors with little besides their faces covered.

Replacing a G-rated tale with adults-only material isn’t new, but playwright Duncan Pflaster’s zany versions of the usual bedtime story suspects and skillful combinations of the flowery with the vulgar make for fresh, original gags. (Wait ‘til you see what’s hidden in the forbidden ballroom.) And amidst all the debauchery, the loveable cast of Prince Trevor delivers every joke, whether an intricate play on words or an exploding expletive, with such sweet-faced sincerity, they often catch us by surprise. Rather than nodding and winking, they wholly inhabit this fantasy world, and each utterance of the word “queer” by a stern medieval king gets that many more startled giggles.

Of course, sweet-faced sincerity doesn’t guarantee precision. Prince Trevor gets funnier and funnier as it goes, but it takes a moment to get rolling, and it has its up and downs. The first scene is by far the weakest: it deals with two minor characters and sets up none of the wicked silliness to come. And throughout the production, the actors feed off the audience’s laughter and the energy of the more frenzied scenes, which results in some unevenness. However, amateurishness adds a certain charm to this most-fractured fairy tale, where stuffy rules don’t apply.

Theatergoers who attend Prince Trevor Amongst the Elephants should expect extremes. If they can take what this play dishes out, they’ll be treated to the belly laughs the right rhymed couplet/castration joke can produce.

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Prince Trevor Amongst the Elephants (90 mins, no intermission)
Presented by Midtown International Theatre Festival
June Havoc Theater @ Abington Performing Arts Complex (312 West 36th Street)
Tickets (212-279-4200): $18.00
Performances: Tuesday, July 22nd, 6:30pm; Friday, July 25th, 9:30pm; Monday, July 28th, 8:30pm; Saturday, August 2nd, 9:30pm