Here at the Diamond Circle Melodrama, adjoining the historic Gold Rush-era Strater Hotel, I have at long last found the solution to bad plays.
And it has nothing to do with hurling malodorous vegetables at the stage or–an expedient sometimes turned to in the Old West–shooting the actors, though Diamond Circle goes in for a lot of that.
It has to do with actual entertainment.
Melodrama, of course, is supposed to be bad. It is to drama what the cliche is to literature. It is as bad as Aaron Spelling television, for many of the same reasons.
The villain sneers and snarls. The heroine swoons. The hero struts and poses boldly.
But it’s a fun kind of bad. With the whiny, chaotic, confusing, self-absorbed, ranting, socially conscious drama of today–not to speak of the grating, atonal, discordant, bad-tempered musicals of today–it’s not always clear who the villains, heroines and heroes are. Everyone seems equally loathsome.
With melodrama, you always know. You’re not only allowed to hoot, jeer and cheer, you’re encouraged.
With modern theater, you dare not peep. The closest to a boo I ever encountered came when I was desperately sneaking out midway through a horrid sort of one-note modern opera about Rasputin, with all sorts of cross dressing and mass murder going on on stage. As I was crawling over the legs of an elderly couple halfway along the aisle, I heard the man whisper, “Lucky!”
It’s no wonder audiences stagger out of today’s Broadway theaters, having paid $75 or $80 a ticket, looking like the extras in “Night of the Living Dead.”
No one staggers out of the Diamond Circle Melodrama, at least not from ennui or overexposure to socially conscious ranting.
The night we took in a show, the bill was “Billy the Kid,” an actual play that debuted in New York in 1906. Billy, set upon his path of gunslingery in the name of avenging his slain mother, is the good guy!
It was wonderfully, marvelously bad, made all the more so by the Diamond Circle’s rather limited stage set budget. The actors were wonderfully, marvelously good–certainly at being bad–including Adam Sears of Buffalo Grove, Ill., a theater major at Decatur’s Millikin University; David Tibble of Wheaton, Ill., who’s appeared with the Wimbledon Theatre in London; Juliet Hicks of the National Shakespeare Conservatory; and newcomer Connie Noyes of St. Louis and Orlando, Fla., one of the swooniest heroines I’ve ever seen wilt in the arms of the brave and true.
But even antic, inspired badness pales after a while. At Diamond Circle, when the dramatic proceedings begin to flag, they bring in actual entertainment.
Much of it comes from the piano player/singer/master of ceremonies, David Holladay, who is relentlessly entertaining despite his having once played John Wilkes Booth in Stephen Sondheim’s chaotic, ranting “Assassins.”
A sort of smart-aleck Hoagy Carmichael, he functions as a ringmaster and Grand Inquisitor of the show, jabbing audience members and performers to keep the mirth abubble.
And it doesn’t stop with the last act. There follows a “Vaudeville Revue” in which, among other things, the abundant Margaux Laskey, who specializes in playing “eccentric old matriarchs and trashy women with attitudes,” transforms herself from Billy’s slain mother to a Mae West type who gives special new meaning to the line, “Take two of these and see me in the morning.”
And the entire cast plays “The Sabre Dance” on water goblets!
If that fails, the actors come out and sell booze and popcorn.
But it doesn’t seem to fail. The audience comes away with that rarity in American theater today (except for a few works by Ken Ludwig and Larry Gelbart), the feeling of having had fun!
Wouldn’t it be marvelous if, at the next dreary drama on the American AIDS epidemic or chaotic ranting on the meaninglessness of the American family, the actors took note of the groans in the audience and turned and said: “All right, we’ll play `Sabre Dance’ on water goblets!”?
Many Americans, of course, don’t go to New York to see dreary dramas and chaotic ranting. They go to that newest and most banal Disney theme park, what we used to call Times Square, and see plotless, pointless, musicals that are little more than Disney cartoons put on stage.
What’s the solution to that?
Easy. Save yourself a few C-notes and come out to Durango instead.
