Safety in (Musical) Numbers

Cellphones, the new rock musical written and directed by Sesame Street veteran William Electric Black, claims that it is "the only show in town where they ask you to turn your cellphone ON!" Now strictly speaking, this is true. The performance opens with a jazzy number titled "Turn Your Cellphone On." However, this song was preceded by several emphatic announcements that the audience's cell phones should, in fact, be turned off. This contradiction exemplifies the internal struggle that forced Cellphones to waver between a merely pleasant show and a really engaging piece of theater. While the production's use of audience participation and its tongue-in-cheek approach to its topical content (the war in Iraq, the Internet, and pornography, to name but a few subjects) encouraged an unusual or even subversive theatrical experience, ultimately Cellphones was not willing to accept the risks that come with such boundary breaking.

The story is concerned with 11 strangers who show up at dawn to a new Department of Homeland Security recruiting booth opening in Central Park. They each want a job protecting our country, but for various unpatriotic reasons: a teenager is running away from home, another girl just wants to be famous, and someone else simply wants a gun. As they wait for the booth to open, the strangers "rock out" about current issues, both of the political and pop-culture variety. The songs are fun in a candy-coated way, and the music jumps adroitly between styles, from salsa to 50's to revival gospel.

The cast is wildly energetic and displays its vocal talents with great aplomb. Although some songs drag as a result of too much formulaic repetition, Black and his collaborators (Joel Diamond, music, and Matt Williams, choreography) should be commended for allowing the multifaceted cast

Love Is All You Need?

Love, they say, is a many-splendored thing. Love is patient, love is kind. Love means never having to say you're sorry, love is as much a light as a flame. There is no shortage of definitions for love, but The Bitterness of the Meringue, the new show at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, proposes a few more. Love is "a tortuous word." It is a "round business," it is where "everybody loses out." It is "vertigo at the abyss." Love is also, if I understood the play right, "salt that seems sweet, sweet that seems salt

Unlikely Pair

Pyretown tells the story of the romance between a divorced mother and a young man in a wheelchair. The play

Simply Wasted

Wasted has a fabulous concept. There is a nameless genre of theater I am fond of, in which a show presents a condensed version of a huge topic, like the history of America or lessons in Western literature. Wasted is subtitled The History of Public Education in the United States and How It Got That Way, which heightened my expectations. I guess that was my mistake.

Playwright Michael Goodfriend, working from a concept by Jim Niesen and the Irondale Ensemble, constructed his play as a film noir. The beginning introduces us to private detective Sam Slate, who is hired to find Jimmy, a missing schoolboy, and investigate the ominous Big Red Schoolhouse.

Private detective? Missing people? Ominous? Huh?

It was a trick, you see. In the subtitle, the word "history" is crossed out, and "mystery" is substituted instead. In fact, Wasted matches the plot of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep pretty much point for point, right down to the retired military man who is the detective's client and the blond femme fatale.

So Sam Slate asks some questions around the Big Red Schoolhouse, which is actually a bizarre mishmash of every education figure and concept of the last century. John Dewey, founder of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, is there, along with teachers from segregated classrooms and the author of the "Dick and Jane" readers. Heck, there's even a phrenologist.

There are villains, too, who usually represent businessmen who have sinister intentions toward the school and mutter ominous phrases like "No child left behind!" while cackling with glee. (I couldn't tell you what their intentions are, because they're never really made clear

This Ace Is Wild!

They met at an open call in Las Vegas for the 80's Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Starlight Express. He was wearing a metallic cat suit and says that she was "a vision in gold lame." Twelve and a half years later, the duo has come straight from their stint as nightly performers at the Bonne Chance Lounge in the San Remo Hotel and Casino to New York to headline in A Touch of Vegas. Trent and Trudy Lee, the fictional creation of Kyle Barisich and Genna Ambateilos, are the stars of this Vegas-style parody playing at the Dominion Theater. Though the set is simple

Que Syringe, Sera

You know you are in for a more unsettling type of comedy when the plot's kickoff is an AIDS-afflicted heroin addict jabbing a 7-year-old girl with a contaminated needle. Even more unsettling is that you find yourself laughing at this. But such is the infectious way of Jamie Linley's Dirty Works, Stiff Upper Lip's sophomore effort now playing at the Greenwich Street Theatre. In a kind of British answer to Trainspotting, Linley takes us to the heart of a London slum and a small crew of nobodies eking out their short lives through a haze of petty crime, promiscuity, and all manner of intoxicants

Quintessential Shepard

"You know me

Not So Magnificent

Legendary filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock once said about his craft, "Cinema is life with the dull bits cut out." Playwright Jonathan Calindas, author of The Magnificent Mr. Vincent, playing at the John Houseman Theatre Studio A, has created a play illustrating the flip side of that quote. Cuchipinoy Productions, a fresh, new theater company founded in 2002 by Rutgers graduates, has taken a great risk in producing a work that spotlights a dull character with a boring life. Their heart is in the right place, and there are real truths to be found within this jumble of random scenes, irrelevant characters, pointless monologues, and mind-numbing dialogue. You just have to look hard for it.

The main character, Vincent, is anything but magnificent. He is a Rutgers college student majoring in computer science, even though he later confesses that the thought of having a computer-related job is depressing. One day he writes a song, sings it at a college hangout, gets a standing ovation, and decides he wants to be a famous songwriter.

He does not change his major in college, does not pursue a musical career, and confesses that he's never really in the mood to write music. Yet he spends the next two years of his life obsessing over the need to write a second song as good as his first. When he graduates from college, he immediately gets a high-paying job working with computers, which, as he predicted, makes him suicidal with grief.

Here the play strikes its strongest chords of truth. Before the reality of a 9 to 5, windowless-office job sinks in, the bright-eyed college grad falls in love with his cubicle, office supplies, and company voice mail. He speaks in front of CEOs in conference rooms and is astounded to earn their respect. His best friend and former band drummer, Jack, also finds success as a businessman and gives a dead-on accurate monologue about the horrors of a New Jersey Transit commute. These are the moments where the story shines. Slowly, the college dreams of rock stardom fade away as cold reality replaces them.

But after this, the story loses its footing. Woven throughout the story is an excessive number of monologues that are wordy and unnecessary. Often they describe pivotal plot moments that should be seen in action. When Vincent matter-of-factly recounts these moments after they have happened, they do not feel important.

To make matters worse, the dialogue spoken between the characters is frustratingly bland. Vincent's conversations with friends sound like this: "How are you?" "Good. And you?" "Good." "Really?" "Yeah." "Good to hear." These slow-paced conversations, stuffed with pregnant pauses between the words, often last for an entire scene before dramatically fading to black, as if something extremely important has just been said.

The focus of this two-hour-and-20-minute play is solely on Vincent. Unfortunately, he spends his days sitting miserably in either a park or office and having idle chats with friends and co-workers. For this reason, he is not an interesting character to watch or listen to.

Even worse, he often admits to not being as passionate about making music as he is about receiving the fame and adoration that come with it. Because he is not a famous songwriter who is written about in Rolling Stone, he declares his musical pursuits worthless. His whiny, passive course of inaction cuts through the heart of this play's central conflict. If he doesn't care enough to even try for his dreams, what makes his story worth hearing?

However, this is not to say the actors and production staff did not do the best they could with the material. This troupe of young Rutgers alumni all majored in some form of theater arts and immediately started pursuing their dreams within their field upon graduation. That in itself is praiseworthy, and their effort to get this play off the ground is commendable. I hope for their success much more than I do for Mr. Vincent's.

Enjoy the Silence

I don't care how cold it is outside. You need to get onto a train and travel to Williamsburg, Brooklyn (otherwise known as the Fourth Dimension), and go see Bizarre Science Fantasy, which is playing at the Brick Theater until Feb. 5. Yes, I know the city is covered in a blanket of unforgiving snow and you can see icicles forming in your breath with every exhale. Those excuses for not leaving the house and seeing this wonderful piece of theater are not good enough. Inside the cozy, brick-lined black-box walls you will be offered a bottle of beer or a glass of whiskey before being whisked away to a place where your darkest nightmares become real.

Under the direction (and

Choose Your Own Theater Adventure

Theater fans with a taste for the irreverent, or those merely suffering from a short attention span, may find the perfect elixir with Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, playing every weekend at the Belt Theatre. Baby, billed as the brainchild of Gregg Allen, is written, directed, and performed by the Neo-Futurists, a Chicago group represented here by a talented sextet of performers able to balance repertory and improvisatory demands on a weekly basis. They create 30 independent vignettes to be performed in the space of one hour, with the order set at the audience's discretion. There's nothing scientific or even artistic to the scene selection. The Neo-Futurists hand out a list of scenes, and audience members shout out the scene number based primarily on the titles in front of them. In 36 weeks, the cast has performed nearly 300 mini-plays.

Some scenes work better than others, which makes sense given that a number of them come and go on a weekly basis. "F****n' Hat," for example, is a surprisingly meaty scene, with Desiree Burch pontificating on negotiating love and sex. Most scenes are much lighter, however: "Small Furry Animals Present: 'Closer' " allows the cast to re-enact the current Mike Nichols movie using stuffed animals. "Deja Smurf," the scene the audience chose to follow it, had the Neo-Futurists replay the previous scene while two cast members applied blue face makeup. "Shot in the Dark" has Burch reading a name out of the phone book and questioning aloud whether that person is in the audience.

And then there are many scenes that involve no dialogue at all, presumably to ease the cast's memorization demands. "The Critique" featured Justin Tolley seated onstage wearing a pair of eye goggles while a tomato sat on a chair across the stage. Tolley waited and waited for an audience member to fling the tomato his way. Finally, someone did. This type of sketch makes for cutesy filler, but says very little. What, exactly, is the subject of the critique?

Another sketch, "Deconstruction of the 80s Family," has the cast replicating the opening credits of TV's Family Ties, with one family member at a time being removed from the picture. That's nice and nostalgic, but pretty facile material. Of course, at times Baby gets even more prurient than that; the evening also included references to male genitalia and even a flasher.

On the other hand, given its premise, there is no reason to take Baby too seriously. But one can't shake the feeling that the cast is trying way too hard to be edgy when they are far better at being tongue-in-cheek rather than hip. Sarah Levy, in particular, stands out. She is reminiscent of Six Feet Under's Lauren Ambrose (but as a brunette) and is equally mercurial. Regie Cabico demonstrates a wonderful degree of physical comedy, and while Michael Cyril Creighton and Molly Flynn lacked similar scenes in which to show off, they complemented the ensemble nicely.

It is unfair to form much of an opinion based on a single night's viewing of Baby, as its experimental nature will always make it seem like a work-in-progress. And while the Neo-Futurists provide an evening that is more diverting than truly memorable, they definitely should be given a chance to continue. The Belt Theatre becomes a restaurant in several weeks, leaving the show in need of a new home. I certainly hope that it finds one, as it would be unfair to let this light go out.

Knitting, Sex, and the Single Life

Who would have ever imagined that knitting could be so symbolic of the trials and tribulations of growing older, finding love, and discovering happiness? That the scores of women (and even some men) who regularly attend knitting circles are metaphorically stitching through their frustrations and disappointments in the hopes of creating a wondrous new scarf

Homage to a Lumberjack

As long as I have lived in New York City, I have made a yearly pilgrimage to St. Mark's Church, ascending the stairs to Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysterical Theatre. I make my way across the dense jungle of folding chairs and spectators, and eagerly await for the sheepish, exhausted-looking Foreman to sit in his wooden throne among the audience and hunch over his soundboard to begin the performance. Every year, I am treated to Foreman's chaotic worlds, ones that reflect the dissonance and violence of the psyche, but remain incredibly lyrical as well. Alarms, demonic voices, and woodblocks ring in my ears, and the ever-present lights pointed at the audience force me to squint to see the grave tableau of bodies onstage.

There was a different sort of anticipation this year, however. Foreman's newest piece, The Gods Are Pounding My Head! (AKA Lumberjack Messiah), may also be his last. Two weeks ago, Foreman told The Village Voice, "I've always claimed that I have a love-hate relationship to the theater. And it's reached a point where I think this is the last sort of play like this that I'll be doing." It appears as though, after 37 years, Foreman is packing up the soundboard.

Needless to say, this will color anyone's impression of The Gods Are Pounding My Head!, and appropriately so. In addition to the stock themes of sex, death, and artistic drive, among others, Foreman has given us two of his most stirring characters to date in the form of two lumberjacks (brilliantly played by Jay Smith and T. Ryder Smith), who struggle with the forging of their own identities and legacy in the face of a world that encourages "pancake people"

Proof of Life

The WOW Caf

All You Can Eat

I squeezed my way around the throngs of twentysomethings that had bottlenecked the path to the West Village bar, waiting to order their drinks in what they thought was only the line. Bumping into tables, stepping on shoes, I slowly traversed the packed floor of Junno's. I crossed over the makeshift stage: a lone microphone standing in a spotlight in a three-foot-square area at the back of the club. Elbowing my way to the bar, I signaled the bartender and took in my surroundings. This certainly was not an ordinary theater space. The press release I had been issued included only marginal information about the show, followed by a two-page, mostly incoherent, rambling story having something to do with fruit salad, Donald Rumsfeld playing Atari, and a Fanta being confiscated by the Secret Service. This certainly was not an ordinary show.

I thought that I was prepared for Deep Dish Cabaret. I thought that I was ready for anything. I was wrong.

The first performer of the evening was Stacy Nightmare (played by Karen Snyder), whose appearance lived up to her moniker. A wig (or was that actually her hair?) rested not-quite-right on her head. She wore glasses with fake eyes painted on them. And where her hands should have been, there were...lobster claws. She waddled up to the microphone and began delivering uncomfortably personal anecdotes about her sex life in a voice that sounded as if she was a love child born from the loins of Gilbert Godfried and Fran Drescher.

Though funny from start to finish, the high point of Stacy's set came as she was forced to take off her lobster claws so she could thumb through a collection of homemade Valentine's Day cards that were extremely vulgar, mildly psychotic, and absolutely hilarious. And yet, as offensive as Stacy Nightmare could have been, her routine had a very honest, self-deprecatory tone that kept the performer constantly in the audience's favor.

Jennifer Demeritt changed the show's atmosphere by reading an essay about her secret life. Corporate-world queen by day, Demeritt lets her bad side out to play a topless maid. Her essay provided a very interesting and stereotype-crushing (if not sometimes unfocused) dissection of the power plays involved in not just naked cleaning but all sexual relationships.

Again shifting gears, Clint McCallum performed as Butcher Slim, a honky-tonk guitar slinger who found musical inspiration watching late-night Star Trek reruns, among other things.

Patrick Borelli rounded out the first act. A seasoned stand-up comedian who has appeared on Late Night With Conan O'Brien, he found humor in the minutiae of life and expressed it in a decidedly non-Seinfeld-esque manner. Borelli seamlessly blended improvised riffs with rehearsed material. His story about wearing a red polo shirt to Staples and consequently having another customer confuse him for an employee had everybody in the bar laughing hysterically.

The second half of Deep Dish Cabaret moved away from straight comedy and into solo performance art, which was decidedly more funny and less serious than it may sound.

A man (and apparently a somewhat well-known performer) calling himself Zero Boy recounted an evening of yelling at his TV, drunken lust with a stranger, and nuclear apocalypse, using only vocal sound effects, hand gestures, and facial expressions. His was a truly unique form of storytelling.

Audrey Crabtree continued the show with a (literally) speechless performance of her own. As a shy librarian named Wednesday, she flirted with the boys and girls in the audience, bringing them up onstage to flirt and dance with her.

But words and noise came back to Deep Dish Cabaret with a vengeance as Eric Davis emerged onstage as Agent Whitbone, a Homeland Security Department agent who couldn't seem to keep his pants up. Garbed in costume wings and a clown's nose, Agent Whitbone tried his best to convince the audience to take him and his solutions to terrorism (which included balloons and yelling) seriously, with no success.

Rounding out the night was Neal Medlyn, who lip-synched a cheesy ballad before tearing off his clothes, jumping on a table, and screaming, "I ain't got no privates!" A one-trick pony, perhaps, but a decidedly funny one to witness.

The evening was emceed by Commander Leslie Gaye of the British Royal Marines. Though uncredited, I have strong reason to suspect he was actually producer Stephen Kosloff. Drink in hand, Gaye sometimes slowed the show down by rattling on a bit too long about nothing in particular. He also lost the Deep Dish Cabaret raffle prize, which sidetracked the action. He drew a few heckles from the drunk and unappreciative members of the audience, but I think he handled it all generally well, moving the show along without major incident and creating the fun and raucous atmosphere that the performers thrived upon.

All in all, I have to say that I would highly recommend Deep Dish Cabaret to anyone that enjoys being shoehorned into a crowded bar in order to drink excessively and laugh continuously at a variety of weird, loud, and debauched characters. However, if this sounds unappealing to you, I suggest you stay far, far away from the next monthly performance. Far, far away.

Sex, Drugs, and Too Much Privilege

What happens when people who have far too much money for their own good run out of things to do, but are desperate never to be bored? Young Minds Productions offers one tantalizing answer to this question in Sex and Hunger, a new play by Kyoung H. Park that presents one night in the lives of a group of tragically over-entitled young people in a Manhattan penthouse. Park

Funny Money

Bag Fulla Money is that rarest of shows, a dark comedy that actually gets lighter as it goes along rather than becoming increasingly heavy. Writer Scott Brooks's production, currently gracing Theater Row's Clurman Theater, is not just a madcap mystery full of double crosses. It is also a sterling example of how solid plotting can buttress even the most trivial-seeming piece of entertainment. Oscar (Christopher Wisner) is a chef working in the basement kitchen of a four-star hotel owned by Mr. Prescott (Stu Richel). Indeed, that is where the entire action of the play occurs, and it kicks into high gear following Oscar's discovery of the titular bag, which contains blood money hidden by two hit men, English (Richard Mazda) and Randall (Darius Stone). The amount is more than a million dollars.

First Oscar enlists the help of his fiancée, Becky (Heather Dilly), who becomes aroused at the mere scent of money. It is not long before she is trying to turn on Oscar by seducing Jimmy (Jon Ecklund), Mr. Prescott's vapid son. The play's convolutions escalate as an interloper named Jonesy (David A. White) and his wife, Laverne (Diana DeLaCruz), separately angle their way into this tangled web—all while trying to avoid the wrath of English and Randall.

The beauty of director Sam Viverito's fluid production is how it never succumbs to any predictable choices, like bumbling slapstick moments, along the way. In fact, with characters entering and exiting as often as they do, he has blocked Money in the great tradition of classic English parlor-room comedies. Brooks has surprises in store at almost every turn, and Viverito not only moves the action along at a good clip but, in hindsight, makes clear each character's sometimes multiple motivations. That said, a scene in which Laverne tries to hide in the kitchen lacks credibility.

And even though the first act addresses murder and dismemberment, Brooks's show actually gets funnier as it goes along and the pieces of his ever-shifting puzzle coalesce. At the performance I saw, the first act was roughly twice as long as the second, which consists largely of denouement. I've been told that at subsequent performances this unnecessary intermission (the show runs just under 90 minutes with one) has been eliminated. Still, the show's last scene, satisfying and conclusive as it is, could use a little more punch to provide a sense of finality.

Viverito has assembled a uniformly stellar cast. DeLaCruz has the facial gestures of a silent-film-era actress, and Ecklund works overtime to make Jimmy seem believably clueless. White offers an enormous amount of charisma as Jonesy, whom the audience sees as both a villain and a charming enigma.

But it is Heather Dilly who runs away with the show from her first moment onstage. Becky is a master manipulator, but Dilly's performance fills in all the shades of gray that fall between femme fatale and class clown. She is bold enough to command the stage in every scene—no one in the audience can look elsewhere during any of her scenes—and she combines those moments with goofy physical comedy, masterful timing, and an often rapid-fire delivery that expresses dominance and panic all at once. Dilly is like a combination of old Hollywood actresses Lucille Ball, Carole Lombard, and Barbara Stanwyck.

Keep an eye on her. In Bag Fulla Money, a show thick with thieves, she steals the show.

Sex, Lies, and Internships

An older man sits with a younger woman in a Washington, D.C., restaurant. The man looks respectable in his suit and tie. The woman is fresh and attractive. We soon discover, if we have not already guessed, that the two are lovers. And if the barely subdued panic in both their eyes has not led us to the next logical conclusion, the young woman soon states it plainly: she is pregnant. What sets this scene apart from its Jerry Springer-level ilk, however, is exactly what captured the nation's prurient attention back in 2001: he is a U.S. congressman, and she is an intern who is about to go missing.

Or are they? In Rob Handel

Shades of Gray

I'm sitting on an extremely uncomfortable and upright couch in the smallish Dixon Place theater on Bowery. My girlfriend, Jenn, has instantly chosen a better seat. I agree to move to the more comfortable couch. Jenn briefly entertains the idea of changing seats again, and I veto the notion. I am the theater critic, and I'm letting my girlfriend dictate our seating preference. Well, enough is enough, I say to myself. We will sit here and watch the opening night of Help Wanted: A Personal Search for Meaningful Employment at the Start of the 21st Century. I will watch it impartially and keep an open mind. And I will not allow any preconceived notions I have of Spalding Gray to inform my opinion.

Josh Lefkowitz, writer and performer of Help Wanted, has made plain his admiration for the late, great playwright in all publicity for the piece. Now, here we are on our new couch, looking at a small table bearing the weight of a tasteful tablecloth, a small bottle of water, and about 30 or so pages of unbound typing paper. These items are heavier than they seem, for they carry with them the weight of a man's life—Gray's entire career and body of work. Lefkowitz better be ready to do some heavy lifting, I think to myself.

The strength of Lefkowitz's arms is not the concern here. He hefts a very heavy text on his own and even makes note of weightlifting in the piece. The instant shock of the first several minutes of the piece is that it is performed entirely within the modus operandi established by Gray, author of such well-known monologues as Swimming to Cambodia. Is this imitation or homage? I find myself, as Lefkowitz does many times in the script, asking myself, What would Spalding do?

In Help Wanted, the author details the story of his script's creation. In the two years leading up to its writing, we follow Lefkowitz through a couple of dead-end jobs, his 20th birthday on Sept. 11, 2001, and eventually a move to Washington, D.C., that results in his first legitimate employment as a working actor. At the story's climax, Lefkowitz comes face to face with his great hero, Gray, just months before the latter's death. Lefkowitz's own story and writing evidences the strengths that he praises in his mentor's work. Help Wanted carefully skirts "the balance between specificity and universality."

As a performer, Lefkowitz crackles on every page and every line. Whether he is embodying characters (like his girlfriend, his parents, and even Gray himself) or chanting a self-composed "Geena Davis" empowerment mantra, he radiates an air of relaxation and calm, a charming eye at the center of his hurricane-like coming of age story.

While reliving the familiar college exercise of writing a research paper in an hour, Lefkowitz openly admits that academic miracles of that nature occur only through "plenty of plagiarizing." On a broader level, he is addressing the question at the forefront of any audience member's mind: Is Help Wanted a justifiable work of plagiarism? Has Lefkowitz swiped Spalding Gray's medium (just as a critic might imitate Gray's monologue style when reviewing this show) to further his own career? That's what I was thinking when I left Dixon Place at around 9:30 that night.

On the way to the 6 train, we stopped at Botanica Bar on Houston Street so I could use the bathroom. Jenn noted that my choice of restroom was funny. On many nights we have visited Botanica. In fact, Botanica is where I took Jenn to introduce her to my friends for the first time, two of whom had decided they would get married on the bench just outside. Botanica is familiar territory in the sprawling, uncharted and unnumbered streets downtown.

It was there, in a haven of comfort on Houston, that my opinion of Lefkowitz's piece cemented itself. As a first-time writer, he is testing the waters of storytelling in a familiar pool. It is clear in the text and performance of Help Wanted that Gray taught him how to swim. Based on the precision and clarity of his strokes, the strength of Lefkowitz's craft should take him to Cambodia and beyond in the years to come.

Bard at the Bar

When you go to an Off-Off-Broadway production of Shakespeare, you can usually count on the script being good, even if the production is weak. When you go to a show performed in a bar, you can usually count on the crowd being good, even if the production is sloppy. But with Twelfth Night: The Drinking Game, returning after a sold-out run last March at the Slipper Room, you can actually count on the evening being good, even if the production isn't polished. The Legitimate Theater Company has hit on a new and innovative way to bring the Bard to the people: make it bawdy, make it fun, and give the people plenty of excuses to drink. The space they've chosen, a bar with an adorable proscenium at one end, is just small enough to allow for lightly microphoned performances but large enough to hold an audience and a separate drinking area. The audience is split into teams and is cued (by a blue card, a red card, or two "flipped birds") when to drink. Then the tale of mistaken identities, gender reversals, and (appropriately enough) drunken revelries plays out, with much consumption of alcoholic beverages.

The surprising thing about the show, besides how well suited it is to the gimmick, is that there were some adventurous takes on roles that are usually cut-and-dried (and often dry). Sir Toby Belch, normally played as a ridiculous old boozehound, is portrayed by Jordan Smith as a harmless, aging frat boy. His partner in crime, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, has been transformed from a cowardly fop into a dim good ol' boy, with Jesse Wilson breathing new life and conviction into every line in a very likable performance.

Kent Meister's Orsino works a sexy/sleazy angle that appeals to the feisty Viola, disguised as his manservant Cesario. But Orsino's behavior with the guys is far different from his fawning conduct toward the mourning Olivia (Morgan Anne Zipf), who doesn't go for him. Viola (Megan Sara Kingery), desperate for her master's approval, sets about wooing Olivia for Orsino, but Viola's ardent speech and indifferent attitude make Olivia fall for Viola's male persona.

There are more outrageous and modern-day tweaks to the text. The relationship between the leather-clad sailor Antonio and pretty boy Sebastian (whom Antonio saved from drowning) is more intimate than avuncular. Maria (Molly Pope) is more slutty wench than saucy handmaiden. Oh, and most of the male characters seem to be almost equally interested in the same sex as in the opposite one. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

This is a very physical, sexual show, with any subtle naughty references made abundantly clear. The staging is frenetic, with the actors sitting in front of the audience and jumping on and off the stage for their cues. Their energy and passion for the material is infectious, and even if the second half is slowed down by plot machinations and a near absence of drinking cues, the performers managed to win over the audience by the end.

For drinkers, this show might bring them to the theater more often. And for theatergoers, it might bring them to the bar more frequently.

You've Got to Laugh, Haven't You?

There is a Russian proverb, so I am told, that says,