Come to this cabaret, old chum

"Whatevah happened to class?" wonder Aimee Doherty and Leigh Barrett.

The funniest thing onstage in Boston this summer - and maybe the funniest thing you'll see on a local stage all year - is the scene above, from And the World Goes 'Round (at the New Rep through this weekend). In it, two of our most talented singer-comediennes, Aimee Doherty and Leigh Barrett, lament the lack of "Class" in the world today - all while demonstrating (in hilarious detail) that they're not really part of the solution, but instead part of the problem.  These two (in real life very classy) ladies have never been more inspired, or more charming - and their scene together is a classic.

It's also the comic peak of an evening that's often effortlessly entertaining, and never less than diverting - indeed, And the World Goes 'Round is probably the strongest cabaret-styled evening I've seen at the New Rep in some time (maybe years).  When I say that, however, I really should put "Cabaret" in quotes, because of course some of the best material in this tribute to composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb comes from their biggest hit, the landmark musical Cabaret.  That triumph (amplified by the brilliantly re-worked Bob Fosse film version), and one other huge hit, Chicago, kept afloat their joint reputation through a series of mixed successes, disappointments, and outright flops on Broadway - but luckily for us, even their biggest bombs contained nuggets of melodic gold, which were strung together into the current revue by Scott Ellis, Susan Stroman, and David Thompson in the early 90's (and thus includes no tunes from their final efforts - including The Visit, Curtains, and The Scottsboro Boys).

I'm not really here, however, to sing the praises of Ellis, Stroman, or Thompson - And the World Goes 'Round seems to me to lack much definition, and even its rhythm kind of comes and goes.  And there are a few songs I wish were missing ("Yes," "Sara Lee") while one or two more ("Nowadays") I wish had made the cut.  The show basically succeeds because so many of the songs themselves are so well-crafted, and so well-suited to - well, a cabaret.  Brassy, jazzy, sometimes a little trashy, the classic Kander and Ebb ditty was a vehicle tailored to a the abilities of a star personality, or designed to sell a certain worldly, slightly tawdry, fabulousness; their songs operate best in that show-biz zone where the mindsets of the diva and the theatre queen largely overlap.  But even if you're the type that smirks at the excesses of Kander and Ebb muses like Liza (or even Chita), still, you can't deny the songs are damn-well crafted - (unlike, to be honest, the sometimes-pretentious shows in which they made their debuts). Ebb's lyrics were consistently elegant in their rhymes and designs, and Kander, though better at the catchy phrase than the unfolding melody, still found plenty of memorable hooks within those limits.

Thus And the World Goes 'Round boasts not only familiar hits ("All That Jazz," "Maybe This Time," "New York, New York") but also charming, unknown numbers ("Coffee in a Cardboard Cup," "Arthur in the Afternoon," "How Lucky Can You Get") from forgotten shows like 70, Girls, 70 and Woman of the Year.  And the members of the New Rep cast - which features not only Doherty and Barrett but also the talented David Costa, De'Lon Grant, and Shannon Lee Jones - mostly sing the hell out of them, and even hoof a little in a vaguely Fosse-esque fashion (both the direction and the choreography are by the reliable Ilyse Robbins).  I felt in general the kickier songs came off best, including the frenzied ensemble number "Coffee in a Cardboard Cup" and the amusingly horny "Arthur in the Afternoon" (in which Shannon Lee Jones shamelessly sang the praises of De'Lon Grant, who proved both an athletic stud and a very good sport).  Not everything was jazzy or hot, however - unexpectedly touching surprises included "Colored Lights," "A Quiet Thing," and "When It All Comes True."  For me, the only wrong note was a weird choral arrangement of "Cabaret" - which seemed to be aiming for a "statement" we'd already long understood - but at least this was immediately followed by a big, gaudy encore of "New York, New York."  As we all know, Kander and Ebb made it there, so they can make it anywhere - including, as this show demonstrates, our own New Repertory Theatre.

Valley of the Dolls

A romantic triangle plays out under an architectural one in DollHouse.

The "doll house" in the New Rep's DollHouse may be the biggest one on record: Kathryn Kawecki's set (at left) soars to the top of the Mosesian Theater, and is all opposed angles and jousting joists; this is a house that clearly could not stand if it weren't for the empty atrium at its core. A nice metaphor for the "classic" marriage analyzed by Henrik Ibsen's classic play, surely - and accurately scaled to the size of the playwright's impact on the culture, too.

The performances in DollHouse, however, are drawn to the dimensions of Ibsen's adapter (and updater), Theresa Rebeck, who has downsized her source into a commentary on the financial foibles of the millennium.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing - under the direction of the thoughtful Bridget Kathleen O'Leary, the New Rep cast offers a series of persuasive portraits of people many of us probably know all too well.  The trouble is that in this gallery of types, Ibsen's sense of archetype has gone missing - and in the central role of Nora (certainly one of the greatest female characters of the past two centuries), has all but been erased.  What's left is Rebeck's usual set of tropes - "good" girls and "bad" girls, and the cheating ways of the moneyed set, and a few funny, feminist "Truth-About-Cats-and-Dogs"-style jabs.  It's not that bad an evening of theatre, actually.  Just don't kid yourself that it's Ibsen.

But first, full disclosure - I had the original fresh in mind when I caught DollHouse, because I'd just come from the closing performance of the Gamm Theatre's A Doll's House the night before.  Not that I cared too much for the Gamm version - much of it was far too broad, but still it hewed to the original script more closely than Rebeck did, and so the depth of the play was often perceptible beneath the surface of the acting.  Oddly, at the New Rep, the opposite was true - the performances were far more subtle, but the script seemed far more superficial.

That superficiality, of course, earned Rebeck one of her most notoriously negative reviews in the Times - which I think played out in her mind as a sexist slap.  Which maybe it was; at least I would never argue that said critic, Alvin Klein, was not a jerk.  Still - he had a point, both about Rebeck's play and her central character.  Ibsen's Nora is a manipulative naïf, a child who grows up before our eyes and realizes that her happy home is merely "a doll house." But Rebeck's Nora is just manipulative - a point unconsciously underlined at the New Rep by the no-nonsense presence of actress Sarah Newhouse, who has been wonderful in other roles, but who couldn't play weakness even on a pair of crutches.  From the opening moments she's obviously a match for Will Lyman as her lightly domineering husband (in the original "Torvald," here "Evan"); this Nora isn't dodging and parrying for her emotional survival, she's doing it to keep the upper hand (and keep herself in Prada).  What's more, where Ibsen's Nora merely forged a signature to save house and home, Rebeck's has pulled off a complicated embezzlement.  True, as she insists, she paid the money back, but the complexity of the caper labels her in the audience's mind as a smooth operator - and it doesn't help things that she stood by while someone else took the fall for her chicanery.  And as for her kids - yeah, rather obviously to this Nora they belong with Barbie in her Malibu camper.  Rebeck's Nora is so unsympathetic, in fact, that sometimes you feel the playwright is almost baiting the audience, along the lines of "So - how do ya like your feminist icon now?"

But if you think the playwright has it mind to deconstruct Ibsen, or feminism - well, think again.  Rebeck seems to imagine that instead of the original's craggy (and at times, admittedly, melodramatic) existentialism, we'll be happy with her smooth ability with satire.  Still, to be fair, she has a few pretty good ideas - Rebeck has made a more convincing romantic figure out of Ibsen's dying Dr. Rank (smoothly underplayed by the talented Diego Arciniegas), which is interesting, even though she doesn't really know where to go with the emotional triangle that results.  And the playwright has done a good job - probably her best work in the play, in fact - of "updating" the original Christine into a world-weary, but also worldly-wise, career woman (here given a wounded, wary depth by Jennie Israel).  As a result, at times DollHouse flickers to life with a low but complex fire.

But in the climactic showdown, I'm afraid the play falters thematically more than it flickers, even if it's still plausibly entertaining.  Evan's abrupt betrayal of Nora, once he learns of her double-dealing, retains its power to shock, but we don't sense from Rebeck the deeper point of this turning point - that Evan and Nora have no real life together, that they've merely been playing at a set of empty bourgeois conventions.  This is because, I'm afraid, Rebeck's own vision is nestled comfortably within that set of conventions - she knows these people are cheats, but she can't seem to express why, and so she can't dramatize Nora's new horizons.  Instead we get an amusing-enough back-and-forth between these soon-to-be exes, the kind of exchange in which the women in the audience occasionally murmur "Right on, sister!" while the men every now and then mutter "You go, bro!"  Rebeck plays both sides of this ancient argument quite well - and of course there's some truth on both sides - but in the process sidesteps the crux of the play.  Which makes DollHouse, I'm afraid, ultimately a house of cards.

Afterthoughts: A Post Story

Thomas Piper encounters a giant avian postman in Afterlife.  (Don't ask.)

It's rare, my friends, that I find myself on the horns of an ethical dilemma, but I've got one poking me in the ass big time right now. You see, I unthinkingly left my gym bag under my seat at the premiere of Afterlife: A Ghost Story at the New Rep last week, and the very nice people who work there retrieved it, and even kept it for me, for several days (as my partner was in New York with our car).  When I finally collected it, everything was right where it should have been - even my checkbook!

So I owe the New Rep big time.

And now, ummm . . . it's time to review Afterlife . . .  and ummmm . . . oh, dear. I really don't know what to say. But I do want to say something nice.  (I never have this kind of problem with the carnies who run the A.R.T.  I'm happy to tell the truth about them!)

But okay, here's what I can say about Afterlife that is absolutely, one-hundred-per-cent true: the New Rep is really much better than this.

Because sorry, I can't recommend Steve Yockey's play; it's basically the first half of Rabbit Hole slammed into the second half of Euridyce, and it feels very padded and kind of pointless, and it's really only ready (at best) for a staged reading. But instead, for reasons unknown, it's getting a rolling premiere across the country; this is perhaps what is most mysterious about this supernatural mystery (or whatever the hell it is). To be absolutely fair, Yockey does, finally, get to some intriguing material about three-quarters of the way through his script - but then he seems to think his work is done, and he rings down the curtain even as the stunned audience all but whispers aloud "It's - over? But it was just getting going!"

Okay - I've clearly no love for Steve Yockey; but it's also absolutely true the New Rep has mounted a very strong production of this very weak material. There is fine work from the entire cast, but particularly from Marianna Bassham, Georgia Lyman, and Dale Place (above, with Thomas Piper). The design is at a strikingly high standard, and the evening even features the literal destruction of a full-scale house by a tidal wave (I'm not kidding). Mr. Yockey's tsunami may leave an immense amount of talent high and dry, but you have to recognize that talent just the same.

And I'll also note, I think, that this playwright is associated with Dad's Garage - the former Atlanta haunt of New Rep artistic director Kate Warner. It seems to me this is not the first time a rather curious play in the New Rep's season has had some connection with that theatre. And so I've begun to wonder whether it's time for the New Rep to wave dear old Dad good-bye, pull out of his Garage for good, and take to the open road. For there are better, more challenging plays out there than are dreamt of in that theatrical body shop - indeed, we'll see a few of them, like Passing Strange, later this year - and the New Rep clearly has the brains and talent to do them justice.

And thanks again guys, for saving my gym bag.

Mamet in the middle

It's always painful watching a really terrible production, but it's positively excruciating watching good actors suffer through a bad play that's been directed even more badly.  You can see the realization that they're bombing slowly register in their eyes, but of course it's not their fault - and none of the actual perpetrators of the disaster are on hand to take the blame, either.  That awareness may be what makes the New Rep production of Boston Marriage, a play that I can only describe as David Mamet's misbegotten love child with Oscar Wilde, particularly agonizing - sitting through it is like watching three talented actresses slowly crucified before your eyes.  And unlike Jesus, who only had to go the distance once, these ladies are going to have to endure this artistic Golgotha six times a week.

Frankly, it's even painful to review a bomb like this, but . . .  well, I thought about skipping out on my duty last night, but today I figured, "Oh, just hold your breath, Garvey, and write it as fast as you can."  So here goes nothing.

Okay, first things first - who's to blame.  Perp #1 is David Mamet (above left) who in mid-career supposedly decided to pen a riposte to critics who claimed he couldn't write roles for women.  But instead of contradicting their argument, he confirmed it.  For the "characters" (and I use that term loosely) of Boston Marriage are certainly not women.  I'm not sure what they are, to be honest - the closest thing I can come up with is "Henny Youngman's idea of gay men in Edwardian drag."  For not only did Mamet decide to shake up his career crisis by writing for women, he also chose to write in a style he thought of as a facsimile of Edwardian wit, although it comes off as a florid undergraduate spoof of something said undergraduate doesn't really understand (and perhaps has a secret contempt for).  Somehow I get the impression the playwright thought hilarity would ensue from simply mentioning words like "reticule" and "rodomontade" - that is when the audience wasn't rolling in the aisles from jokes like "I was stroking your muff when your parts came."  But what can I say, he was so wrong.  I admit some of these lines do get laughs, but they're of the "OMG, that's the weirdest one yet!" variety.  (Fans of The Room take note - it occurs to me you could really enjoy this production.)

But anyway - I swore I'd write this as fast as I could.  So - the plot is about conniving lesbians.  Okay?  'Nuff said!

On to Perp #2 - Kate Warner, artistic director of the New Rep.  WHAT was she thinking?? We thought she had an erring eye when she chose Mister Roberts for her opener last season, but now I'm beginning to wonder if she doesn't have a kind of fever that comes on annually, and only affects her play choice for September.  For it bears mentioning, I think, that Boston Marriage has been seen twice already in the Boston area - once at the A.R.T., and once at Merrimack - and nobody has been asking to see it again (particularly not the people who saw it the first time).   I'm not about to give up on Ms. Warner - there were several good shows at the New Rep last spring; but I would advise subscribers to stick to the offer that allows you to choose your own plays - and give a thought to red-pencilling the one in September.

Finally, Perp #3 - director David Zoffoli.  Wow, where to begin.  Zoffoli inflates this logorrheic bamboozlement into a two-hour skit that might have shamed Carol Burnett and Ryan Landry.  I've heard from other critics that with a lighter touch, the script is more bearable - not actually good, but bearable.  But here everything is telegraphed, or over-acted, or even flat-out shouted; the actresses literally brace themselves at times, legs planted far apart, the better to holler at each other from opposite ends of the overlit, gargantuan set.   I'm not kidding when I say I've never seen anything like this on a professional stage.  It's up there (or down there) with the worst pieces of direction I've ever encountered in my life.  (Just as an aside, while the design of the show is quite bizarre, it does all kind of hang together; the designers did their job, such as it is.)

As for the actresses - well, connoisseurs of the arcane may find some intrigue in the fact that as Mamet's warring lesbians, Debra Wise and Jennie Israel are both incredibly broad and campy, but in slightly different keys.  Wise is  entirely presentational, while poor Israel looks like she's being forced to violate something like a characterization.  Both are very good actresses generally, so nobody should hold this show against them, but it is interesting to note their contrasting body language as the deadly shenanigans grind into their second hour: Israel looks increasingly guilty, Wise all the more determined to survive, no matter what.  Meanwhile sidekick Melissa Baroni is just as schticky, but as she's playing schtick to begin with, she probably comes off the best of the three.

At any rate, eventually the show does end - and the run will, too, eventually.  There's a light at the end of the tunnel for everyone.  So here's to you, ladies!  And now I have to go have a drink.

That which does not kill us only makes us stronger! the talented actresses of Boston Marriage agree.

Sophie's voice

Mary Callanan as the repressible Sophie Tucker.

Reviewer complaints about the New Rep's Sophie Tucker: Last of the Red Hot Mamas have been many, but most have have fallen into two camps. The first, given by young reviewers (at the Herald and the Arts Fuse), was the common millennial cry of "This isn't about me!," an observation which is hard to deny. The other complaint has been "This is politically incorrect - and I don't mean 'politically incorrect,' I mean actually politically incorrect!" (That was the Globe's take.)

Which is also pretty much true, because Last of the Red Hot Mamas fiddles very little with an act (or its political attitudes) that by now is almost a century old. Indeed, even though there are three authors attached to this little revue, all they've done is basically serve up Sophie Tucker's greatest hits, so it's hard to see how they earned their royalties.

Still, those hits have endured for a reason, as they say - their concerns are classic rather than up-to-the-minute - and it's nice to hear them once again in a light-heartedly risqué evening. No, the show's not "red hot" - but was the frumpy Tucker ever really "red hot"? That was always kind of a joke, boys and girls.

Of course Tucker's witty novelty numbers, such as "Living Alone and I Like It," "You Gotta See Your Mama Every Night" and "I Don't Want to Get Thin" did reflect an independent woman of her day dealing with love and sex on her own terms. These ideas aren't cutting edge now, but they're certainly still apropos. And to be fair, her millennial sisters cheer along on those. But they're not so sure about her frank enjoyment in pleasing a man sexually (this may be why many of Tucker's current fans are gay men) and her no-nonsense acceptance of the ethnic and sexual tropes of her day (like many Jewish entertainers of her era, she for a time performed in blackface) likewise make today's progressives hold their noses. Callanan doesn't don blackface, of course, but she does roll out one of the hits Tucker sang that way, the wonderful "Darktown Strutters' Ball," which gave the Globe a conniption.

Why should this be so? I can't understand the modern mania for transmogrifying the past - whether it's Sophie Tucker or Shakespeare - into some idealized version of the present; a present, I'd like to remind you, in which racial, ethnic, and sexual codes are still completely embedded, even as they're routinely denied. No, Sophie didn't deny these codes - she simply transcended them; this has been the solution of progressive entertainers since time began. And more power to her, I say. What are these critics hoping for - Kate Clinton sings Gershwin?


Bette Midler knew all too well the source of her own act - a scene from her Divine Madness concert film.

I do have my complaints about Last of the Red Hot Mamas, but they're mild, and centered on the performers. The reviewers who dissed the show were all careful to praise star Mary Callanan, who seems to have everything it takes to put over Tucker's material (aside from that Jewish pedigree); she has a big, warm, brassy presence, and a voice that, quite frankly, puts Tucker's to shame. But at least on opening weekend, Callanan was slightly restrained and self-conscious; she wasn't having fun yet - and since that's what she's known for, the mood of the show was slightly distanced. Was Callanan thrown by the big, empty set - or was her tentativeness due to a desire to reproduce Tucker's vocal affect precisely? If that's the case, fuhgeddaboudit and just make it your own, Mary. I wasn't too excited by accompanist Todd C. Gordon's piano playing, either. Gordon was dryly witty in his banter with Callanan, but he banged his way through most numbers, in a manner that I guess counts as "period" - but I longed for a lighter, more evocative touch on torch songs like "The Man I Love" and "After You've Gone" - works that have been transformed over time into far richer documents than they seemed in Tucker's day. That's the kind of updating that I would have been down with.

I was still bemused, and occasionally bewitched, however, by this entertainingly ribald blast from the past. Callanan did well by the gorgeous standards in the show (there are four of them) and she certainly knows how to land the hilariously naughty "Ernie" jokes (above, served up by the inimitable Bette Midler). My gut is the show will pull together - and even now you could do far worse on a sultry summer night.

It's the end of the world as we know it

Scott Sweatt proposes, and Karen MacDonald disposes, in boom.

We all fall down and go "boom" in boom (now at the New Rep through March 13). As in all of us. Everybody. Yep, it's the end of the world as we know it, but playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb still feels fine. Because in the larger scheme of things - as in the very large, geological-age scheme of things - life goes on. Just maybe not our version of it.

Or at least that's the amusing message of this latest work from the Millennial School of Quirk. In Nachtrieb's end-of-the-worldview, even the apocalypse should be set in lower case (like his title) because there's always another world out there to replace this one. So just chill out and get over yourself, mankind! It's all going to be ok, or at least meta-ok.

Because the meaning of everything depends on how you frame it. That's why the set of boom is strangely bifurcated: half the stage is occupied by a fall-out shelter built by nervous, nerdy Jules (Scott Sweatt), the other half by a funny control booth in which aging-hippie Barbara (Karen MacDonald) either pulls levers like some addled Wizard of Oz or just bangs a gong like the ghost of Keith Moon.

We slowly gather that Barbara is a kind of docent in bifocals, and that Jules isn't the "real" Jules at all, but rather a simulation of Jules in a high-tech diorama in some Museum of the Future. The "play" as it exists is just the future's best guess at what actually transpired when poor Jules realized that a comet was about to go rogue and fry the Earth, and tricked bitter, lonely Jo (Zofia Gozynska) into joining him in his bachelor pad/fallout shelter for "sex that will change the world." Or maybe save it.

Actually, make that a big "maybe." For as the world is reduced to a cinder outside the shelter's doors, we discover that fussy Jules is gay and damaged Jo hates babies. So the world has thrown a wrench - or maybe a boomerang - into this New Age Noah's desperate plan to save it, and a form of bleak hilarity ensues. For the most part.

But then again, nothing is really as it seems in Nachtrieb's existential diorama. The "past" is utterly unstable (the diorama stops and starts in fits), so what does that mean about the present - or the future? Indeed, even the seemingly omnipotent Barbara - who bangs away at her drum kit to emphasize what she thinks are the important parts of the story - is framed by another, unseen level of authority, and at times her exhibit seems to almost have a mind of its own. "Reality," the playwright tells us (maybe once too often) is a slippery concept. And since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes?

So somebody once said, who also felt that there's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we will. That seems to be Nachtrieb's point, too, even if he's a good deal more upbeat about it than a certain great Dane was. For as we realize at the last moment, (spoiler alert!) the hapless Jules really is a hero, and really did save life on earth. Then again, maybe Jo did. At any rate, the moral consequences of our actions indeed are profound; we just can't be sure what they're going to be. So while Jo wails at one point that she's "looking for a story of hope," she might pause to consider whether she's actually in one.

In Bridget Kathleen O'Leary's solid production at the New Rep, most of these witty ideas come over - although not, apparently, to many of the major critics, who in general seem to have missed the point of the play (no, for once I'm not going to name names, but you know who you are). The production is anchored by the wonderful Karen MacDonald, who turns Barbara into a hilariously ditzy boomer who seems to have been teleported into the distant future direct from San Francisco, complete with hair extensions and a blouse emblazoned with a big bloom (for "flower child"). (Actually, MacDonald's characterization doesn't line up with what we eventually learn of Barbara's true identity, but it's so sweetly observed we don't really care.) Scott Sweatt meanwhile makes of Jules an appealingly goofy, if utterly determined, micro-manager, and if Zofia Gozynska doesn't get as far with the punky, potty-mouthed Jo, then it must be admitted that Nachtrieb seems to have left her with at least one too many bizarre thematic points to cover. The big gap at the New Rep, I'm afraid, is Jarrod Bray's set, which simply isn't stylish or clever enough to put over the play's concept or air-quote tone (it doesn't even look much like a diorama). Somehow this seems to throw the show's occasional longeurs into higher relief. But then again, it's not the end of the world.

Mash up your Shakespeare

One more into the time-space-continuum gap! Tony Larkin, Benjamin Evett, and Ed Hoopman indulge themselves.

So - are you ready for a gay-Tom-Stoppard, "Fleance-and-Malcolm-Aren't-Dead-But-Getting-Married-in-Vegas" kind of metaphysical-philosophical mash-up? At first I didn't think I was, either, but I admit the New Rep, and its crack comic cast (headlined by a hilarious Benjamin Evett), did eventually win me over, and I began to indulge Indulgences, the new production of Chris Craddock's meta-comedy which runs through February 6. This is a very silly show, and kind of conceptually sloppy - but it is a funny show, certainly the funniest in town, and you don't have to tell me what that means in January in Boston. (It means the New Rep has a hit.)

And it's nice to see new artistic director Kate Warner, who seemed to stumble slightly on her maiden voyage with Mister Roberts, right herself here, with a crisp, clever production that's tighter than a duck's you-know-what. It's true the play itself isn't nearly that taut - Canadian author Chris Craddock mashes together Shakespeare, Mamet, The Prince and the Pauper, "Fractured Fairy Tales," and a whole lot more in this long-form skit about cross-dressing and destiny - and part of the joke is that he doesn't much care that most of his gambits don't hang together. Shakespeare's Fleance and Malcolm, for instance, who drive the plot of the show, were never even friends in Macbeth, so when they meet for drinks in some sort of Purgatorial pick-up bar with a fallen angel who's a kind of insurance salesman, we do think to ourselves, "WTF, milord?" Or at least I did.

But wait a minute, let's back up. Here's the set-up: two Shakespearean characters (Malcolm and Fleance, played by Ed Hoopman and Tony Larkin) walk into a bar, where they meet, no, not a priest and a rabbi, but a seller of "indulgences" (Benjamin Evett). Remember those? I think the Catholic church actually still sells 'em, but at their height they were the proud pinnacle of Her venerable commitment to corruption - time-off in Purgatory was available for a variety of sins, for a small fee (or a large one, depending on the sin).

Only Craddock's salesman isn't some hack from the Vatican - he's from the Big Kahuna himself. As in Jehovah. Yahweh. The Almighty.

Which is quite an interesting intellectual proposition - God himself is offering an escape hatch from his own morality? Indulgences that work? And get a load of His reason - he wants to "re-inforce free will!" Holy conundrum, Mr. Stoppard! For a moment, it seems like a heavenly host of fascinating dialectics about the knotty problem of pre-destination might be in the offing.

But no such luck; playwright Craddock may scramble the dramaturgical map to pin his themes, but he isn't actually serious enough about them to indulge in any intellectual depth. Instead, he skates along the contradictions of Catholic philosophy to hilarious, but not deeply satisfying, effect. Still, that's enough for Saturday night. I won't get into the silly-and-sillier plot, except to say that Malcolm and Fleance want to both get hitched and kill Dad, who's not hip to modern romance. Only they don't know that Dad isn't actually Dad - he sort of swapped spots in the universe with some schlub from the present day (back in that Purgatorial bar). Who wants his old gig back. Then there's the schemers in the palace, who methinks fpout a moft excellent pastiche of pfeudo-Shakespeareana; they've got their fub-plot, too.

All this comes crashing, or rather mashing, together in the expertly-rendered second half, when Evett's Salesman has second thoughts about just what God hath wrought, and tries to avert the hilarious mayhem he sees about to ensue. Evett's at his desperate best here as he confronts God's "ineffability," although he's really in fine form throughout, and this dissipated, wiseguy with a heart-o-gold probably counts as his best performance in years. When he's on it, Evett owns the stage, and the show, too - but it would be unfair to slight his cohorts in comedy, who know how to give great backup. Neil A. Casey is a delightful hoot (as usual) as Malcolm's Republican dad (and Joel Colodner makes witty hay of his frustrated doppelgänger), Tony Larkin plays Fleance with gay abandon, and Leigh Barrett, whose beauty mark seems to ramble from cheek to cheek, proves she can cut an Elizabethan caper with the best of 'em (Casey and Barrett, with Steven Barkhimer, above left). Based on this performance, I'd love to see her in Merry Wives of Windsor. And I hope I don't have to be in a parallel universe for that to happen.