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1 GayMardiGras.COM NOLAPride.ORG July 23-August 5, 2013 Facebook.COM/AmbushMag The Official Mag: AmbushMag.COM 31

2 ambush paparazzi Easy Earl, Glen & Frankie back together Oz Joshua & 700 Club Festive Ninth Circle Good Friends Cha Cha snaggin glasses from Cafe Lafitte s for Good Friends Bar Oz s Glen & Tommy welcome Pensacola s Q, Johnny & Ted to the Land of Dance Partners Ernie & Patrick join French Quarter Suites/New Orleans Courtyard s Blake Bourbon Pub & Parade Bourbon Pub & Parade manager Joe Palafox & owner Sandy Bourbon Pub & Parade Catch Scott behind the Michael s On The Park The Pussy Footers stop Oz Dingo with Blanche Debris & Frankie Oz Former SDGM Misael & Oz DJ Tim, DJ JRB & DJ GAA Top 5 Dance Club of the Year Finalist Oz Shane & Michael s On The Park Host Frankie Fierce with the stars Deja, Bootsie & Cookie Greg all Voodoo Manager Rainbow Room Nightlife ~ Photos by Frankie Fierce, Larry Graham, Paul Melancon, Rip Naquin Halloween s Dustin & Blanche join Halloween Host sponsor Oz Lil Matt bartending at 700 Club Ron, Tim, Regina & Eva Las Vegas celebrating Regina s Michael s On The Park Dancer Rainbow Room 32 The Official Mag: AmbushMag.COM July 23-August 5, 2013 Official ficial Southern n Decadence Guide SouthernDecadence.COM

3 trodding the boards...from 30 when he s dying. That said, while it makes sense to have Bartelle portray both Mercutio and Verona s Prince, since they re kinsmen, it s a little disconcerting to see the actor who s just been killed as Mercutio come back alive moments later as the Prince. Just takes something away from death s finality. Shakespeare really did an awesome job of capturing how a privileged 13-year-old girl would speak. Silas Cooper is fine as Friar Lawrence, but, man, the Friar rambles on. A few lines judiciously cut would not have been missed in this two-and-ahalf hour, though well-paced, outing. In his one scene, the Apothecary looks like he wandered in from Spamalot. Sam Dudley (Benvolio), Danny Bowen (Lord Capulet), Casey Groves (Lord Montague) and Stephen Eckert (Paris) are others who are meritorious in their roles. Emily Russell, generally matches Carbo s performance in the first act but tends to become a bit shrill later on, causing the audience to become less invested in her fate. It is certainly a challenge, however, for an adult to play [continued on 35] GayMardiGras.COM NOLAPride.ORG July 23-August 5, 2013 Facebook.COM/AmbushMag The Official Mag: AmbushMag.COM 33

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5 trodding the boards...from 33 a 13-year-old. Romeo/Carbo s kiss is pretty passionate to elicit Juliet s withering You kiss by the book response. Though Diana Shortes is certainly youthful, Lady Capulet is supposed to be about 26. And would Lord Capulet be so much older than she, especially as they ve only had the one child? Just wondering. Fight Director Burton Tedesco did an excellent job at making the swordplay exciting and dramatic even if some of the duels went on a tad long. And, as Tybalt, Tedesco gives his best performance I ve yet seen. Wendy Miklovic s Nurse is okay, but a bit on the cliched side with too much mugging substituting for real emotion. Notwithstanding all that, I came away from this R&J with two main thoughts. 1. Having presented a revelatory Romeo and Juliet in 2006, which was nominated for five Ambie Awards, winning two (for Gary Rucker s keen direction and Sharon London s dignified Nurse), why must we have it again so soon? I can appreciate its box office appeal, but what of the other plays that TSF has not yet done, even taking into account intern productions? How about Troilus and Cressida orall s Well That Ends Well or Pericles or Titus Andronicus, all of which I ve seen magical productions of elsewhere? Or even Cymbeline or King John or Timon of Athens just to expose them to New Orleans audiences? 2. Amy Holtcamp s Director s Note cogently limns various approaches to R&J. Why then did she take such a bloodless one? I m aware that not everyone is acquainted with Romeo and Juliet and they deserve to see it in a straightforward manner (though I suspect the audience with which I saw it had at least a passing familiarity with it). Still, this is a touchstone of the dramatic canon. We ought to know the tale and look toward the director to bring something new and fresh to it. While R&J was a vast improvement over Holtcamp s sludgy Julius Caesar of 2011, as I watched this semi-admirable, tradition-bound R&J, unlike Rucker s, there were no new insights to be gleaned from it, giving me ample time to muse on those items above. I hate to be so harsh as I can view this R&J simultaneously as a glass half-full and half-empty. I hope that next season the Tulane Shakespeare Festival will give cause to see only full glasses. Killer Joe at The Allways Lounge and Theatre through July 27 Entering the world of Killer Joe you ll come across a man passing a joint to his son, a woman who answers the front door half-naked (and not the top half), and a steady diet of tuna casserole, junk food and beer, lots of beer. Playwright Tracy Letts fittingly defines the trailer trash landscape of Texas in his American Gothic-esque first play. His Smith clan (note the generic name) are not only a truly dysfunctional family but each member is really stupid in his or her own way. Okay, maybe not the daughter, but that still leaves three out of four. This ain t Shakespeare (the onstage body count isn t as high for one) but it holds your attention due to Letts wellcrafted dialog and plotting of this darkand-stormy-night nasty noir-ish tale of an insurance con gone wrong. Yet it promises more than it delivers leaving you still somewhat hungry at the end. Not unlike the fast food that its denizens avidly consume. Benjamin Clements directs efficiently and pays meticulous attention to the script (nothing wrong with that) but a little more expansiveness would not have been unwelcome. In other words, given that the script is 20 years old and had a high profile off-broadway revival 15 years ago, I wished, similar to Romeo and Juliet above, Clements had brought something uniquely Clement-ine to thisproduction. Though this is the show s New Orleans premiere, in the 20 years of reality-laden TV since its debut, what once was shocking, simply isn t any more. And a killer cop as the depths of depravity? Hey, we did that in NOLA years ago! What then can this production say about the here and now? While John Grimsley s set, all cheap Formica paneling and tacky venetian blinds, is incredibly authentic, it seemed to me more low class tract housing than trailer park. More importantly, while I m sure budgetary concerns come into play, some suggestion of an outside world whether inspired by Edward Hopper or Georgia O Keefe or Andy Warhol might have been nice. Don t get me wrong Grimsley did an excellent job and Vic Woodward s lighting is very good, but they lack a sense of the mythic. As the dim paterfamilias, Dane Rhodes brings bigger-than-life passion to every line-reading and scratch of his private parts. Lurking beneath the bluster, however, Rhodes hints at Ansel s vestigial conscience. If there s ever a stage version of The Honeymooners, he just might be your Ralph Kramden. Andrea Watson wonderfully makes Sharla, Ansel s second wife, a toughas-nails sexpot with a practical streak as well. Her outfit and make-up would seem overdone, but judging by some women I ve seen around here, they re not. Maxwell Thornton, an actor new to me, is convincingly doltish yet charming in a low-class way; that he s Ansel s son is never in doubt. His monolog about trying to manage a rabbit farm is a hoot and very well done. Lucy Faust, with her innocent eyes and child-like mien, would seem to be the perfect actress for Dottie, Ansel s sleepwalking daughter. And there was much to commend in her winning performance, alternately pouty and captivating. But, as was the case with her remarkable Juliet in the aforementioned 2006 Romeo and Juliet, she projects a deep-rooted intelligence, that I m not entirely sure is part of Dottie s persona. Similarly, James Howard Wright, an innately nice person typically given to playing fatherly types, makes a believable Joe Cooper, a.k.a. Killer Joe, in the first act as we re getting to know him. Flaunting an impressive vocabulary and a shaved head, he plays it polite and low key as is standard for this character; he reminded me of Clint Eastwood in one of his flinty but decent man parts. Yet when he has to exude the menace that Letts calls for, Wright simply doesn t have it in him and Act Two feels somewhat enervated because of that. It didn t help that Mike Yahn s climatic fight choreography seemed to be off the night I saw it; let s assume things have been patched up by now. Ironically, Faust and Wright make the end of Act One, described in the New York Times as one of the sickest (and...sexiest) seduction scenes ever, while still bizarre, the beginning of what turns into a truly touching relationship. Sure, there s an age difference, but at 20, Dottie s no longer jailbait. And, yes, Joe s a psychopath but he s protective of her and not that much worse than the conniving Smiths. Crazy as it sounds, I was kinda hoping Joe and Dottie would ride off into the sunset together. Killer Joe may not be essential theater but, despite its shortcomings, for the price of little more than a movie it offers some fun depravity at the suitably louche AllWays. You have three more chances to observe a family that ll make yours look completely normal. Jekyll & Hyde, The Musical at Playmakers Theater, Covington through July 28 Anyone who s been paying attention to the Great White Way will recall that Frank Wildhorn has had six musicals produced on Broadway in the last 15 years, all of them critical and financial duds. Where he finds his investors, I d love to know! So it was with lowered expectations and a sense of curiosity that I approached Playmakers production of his Jekyll & Hyde, which had a long, if unprofitable, Broadway run spawning legions of Jekkie fans. As it turns out, Wildhorn s music is not so bad, a kind of cousin to secondtier Andrew Lloyd Webber s which is still better than most. Leslie Bricusse s lyrics, though, are appallingly simplistic with rhymes a sophisticated secondgrader could ve pulled off. And his book is a reductivist version of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic. Still, having sat through The Wedding Singer and Flashdance, I ve seen worse. I thus admire Playmakers for taking a chance on this and at least trying something relatively new. And if the results weren t always Broadway caliber, this might actually be an instance where less is more. Hey, I ll take unamplified voices over miked ones and imagination over holograms any day! Director Adolfo Rodriguez s biggest gamble is setting his production in a nebulous world between past and present. Costumes range from Victorian bodices to contemporary jeans, and a small plastic Kentwood water bottle is set against an old-fashioned lectern. I wouldn t mind this steampunk approach but there didn t seem to be any consistency to it, as though Rodriguez and his designers hadn t fully thought it through. Still, it was interesting. Other than that, Rodriguez keeps the show moving forward though set changes involving his black and white panels sometimes slow things down. He inventively deploys the large cast throughout the theater, and while I suspect it s a challenge to coordinate so many people, his wife Cashel s choreography doesn t give them as much to work with as they deserve. The lead roles are double cast. The night I saw it, in the opening scenes Chris Newhouse seemed too young and not possessed of a strong enough voice for Jekyll. But once Jekyll transformed into Hyde, Newhouse was transformed too. His voice became powerful, his coltish energy became focused, and a heretofore missing passion emerged, an investiture in the character separate from Jekyll s niceness. Having seen Newhouse in featured roles at NOCCA, it was thrilling to see him metamorphose into a leading man. More than just flipping his hair up and down (very cool that though), he precisely differentiates Jekyll from Hyde. Calla Harper, with her teardrop face and exquisite vocals, makes Lucy, the prostitute who becomes involved with Hyde, a touching presence, lending heart and immediacy to the show. As for the other actors, their strength lies more in their singing ability than acting. There are some fine voices, notably Karista Filopoulos (Emma Carew), Frank Bonner (Danvers Carew) and even Andrew Aceves in the small role of a newsboy. Best of all is when the whole large cast sings together. Next up at Playmakers, in September, is the 25 th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. I look forward to seeing what they can do with this delightful musical. GayMardiGras.COM NOLAPride.ORG July 23-August 5, 2013 Facebook.COM/AmbushMag The Official Mag: AmbushMag.COM 35

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