Like its more famous Tony Award-winning cousin, “City of Angels,” Eric Overmyer’s “In a Pig’s Valise” is a musical comedy spoof of the hot-cool private-eye pulp fiction associated with Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.
Except that it’s wilder, much wilder. “Valise,” among other oddities, features a stubby villain named Shrimp Bucket, an “ethnic dancer” heroine named Dolores Con Leche (or, as the gumshoe hero, James Taxi, calls her, Sadness With Milk) and, in a bit part homage to Hammett’s real-life lover, an undercover FBI agent named Lillian Hellman.
The plot, as with many of the old P.I. stories, is so full of twists that it’s next to incomprehensible, but it has something to do with Taxi’s efforts to find out why Shrimp Bucket and his brother, Gut, are stealing the sexy Con Leche’s dreams.
Spiced with songs by August Darnell (Kid Creole) that bear such lines as “Kiss Me Deadly” and “Never Judge a Thriller by Its Cover,” Overmyer’s dialogue relies heavily for its laughs on its broad, winking satire of the language and plot conventions of the old books and movies.
Acting as narrator for his story, Taxi refers to “the big V.O.” (voice over) technique, and, when a wailing sax in the background interrupts his musings, he marvels at the “underscoring” for the scene.
Taxi also goes in for the exaggerated similes that peppered Chandler’s novels. (“I woke up,” he says, “feeling like a mafioso construction job was slapping together a condo in my back brain.”)
Shattered Globe Theatre, which is presenting the Midwest premiere of “Valise” in its cramped storefront quarters, has a lot of fun with this kind of material.
Using a runway that extends lengthwise through the shoe box theater and cuts the house in half, director Roger Smart’s ambitious little production parades the actors through fog, strobe lights, a cheap bedroom in Heartbreak Hotel (at the corner of Neon and Lonely), a hot pink nightclub interior and the amusingly cheesy choreography devised for the non-dancer actors by Michael Quaintance.
The cast members, some performing in drag, enjoy their work, although most of the players don’t have the polished comic skills to take full advantage of the sendups that Overmyer has served up.
However, Joe Forbrich, as the laconic Taxi, has mastered the deadpan voice of the private eye narrator, and he sings well too.
Rebecca Jordan, as the sizzling Con Leche, can’t sing, but, as Taxi says, “She had gams that could raise goose flesh on a tossed salad”; and Eileen Niccolai, with a gap-toothed smile and painted-on mustache, struts her/his stuff with gusto as the shrimpy Shrimp Bucket.
Tucked away in a tight corner and out of sight, music director Pamela Jordan’s tiny band performs mightily, both with underscoring and as accompaniment for the singers.
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“In a Pig’s Valise”
When: Continuing
Where: Shattered Globe Theatre, 2856 N. Halsted St., Chicago
Phone: 312-404-1237
