The very best thing I can say
about Ruthless! The Musical, and
it’s a compliment, is that it’s the camp musical for people who hate camp
musicals. Offered in an open-ended run of 4 perfs a week at St Luke’s on 46th
Street (a unique house which allows disparate, unrelated shows to run in a kind
of repertory), this revival of the 1992 musical is a mash-up spoof, satirizing
elements of stage mother stories like Gypsy and evil child stories like The Bad Seed. What makes it different from most camp musicals is
that its campiness is not a pretext for naughty homosexual humor—this
despite that one of its lead all-female roles is usually played by an extravagant
character man in drag—but genuine genre send-up on its own terms. (That
said, there’s certainly a gay sensibility, but borne of diva worship and loving
the affiliated show business tropes, not cheap phallic-centric humor; if you’ll forgive the oxymoron, Ruthless
plays its lampooning straight.) Another
thing that distinguishes it is a well-crafted score. It doesn’t go anyplace
new, but its music by Marvin Laird is attractive and
catchy; its lyrics by Joel Paley honor
well-built arguments, wit and perfect rhyme; and its book…
…well,
okay, its book, also by Paley. Witty, as far as these things go, a little
preposterous, as to be expected…but if you’re not reveling in the revelry (and
I must admit, most people in the audience were, night I attended), you’re kind
of done with it 30 minutes into its 90 intermissionless minutes. As with most
camp, the strength is in introducing the familiar character and plot tropes to
be lampooned with enough wit and affection to get the audience on board. But
the lampooning gets increasingly harder to sustain, because bereft of a real
plot, there’s only a cobbled together stand-in for a plot, which is the joke
target; which means the longer the show goes on, the more diluted the storytelling
becomes and the more the actors invest in pumping up attitude, because it
becomes less and less possible to play for real stakes, and the target harder
to see. And in fact, the whole (former) second act of Ruthless (which no longer has an intermission) is actually, pointedly built around the conceit of plot disintegrating into existential
absurdity; where Ruthless, in its
(former) Act One, just winks at
the audience, in its (former) Act Two, it puts on the gag glasses with the
bouncing eyeballs, as if to say, There’s no real closure here, let’s
just party. Rather like the end sequence of
Blazing Saddles, but on the super
cheap, production-value wise.
But
it’s all sharply delivered—again, as in its debut, directed by
Paley—and he has a crackerjack cast aiding and abetting him: Tori
Murray as the ambitious child star to be
(a genuine, charismatic child and scarily in control of her professional
toolkit), Kim Maresca as her
hapless mother, plus Andrea McCullough, and Rita McKenzie (a
veteran of the original production). Unseen by me, there is now also Paul Pecorino in the role of the obsessive agent and coach, Sylvia
St Croix (traditionally the drag role), who has taken over from the excellent Peter
Land who withdrew (temporarily, one hopes)
for (genuine) medical reasons. Basically, Ruthless: the Musical is
what it is; and if you go expecting exactly what I’ve described, the chances
are slim that you’ll be disappointed. And not bad that you'll be taken with its giddiness. You may even laugh. Out loud.
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