The Doyle and Debbie Show
At the Royal George Cabaret Theatre
By Dan Zeff
Chicago – Country music can be whiney, right wing, corny, and macho. In the case of “The Doyle and Debbie Show,” it is also hilarious. I am no lover of country music, but who can resist a revue that includes numbers like “Stock Car Love,” “Barefoot and Pregnant,” and “I’m No Homo (But You Sure Look Good to Me)”?
“The
Doyle and Debbie Show” originated five years ago in Nashville (where else?).
The show is playing the Royal George Cabaret Theatre, which has been converted
into a replica of the Station Inn, an actual country music club in Nashville.
Doyle Mayfield is an aging second tier country music singer who has been through four wives and three Debbie co-stars. The revue is presented as Doyle’s comeback, with Debbie number three at his side. The current Debbie is a single mother with three small children, her trailer trash childhood another addition to the show’s stockpile of country clichés. Debbie’s facial expression throughout the evening signifies that that lady is having second thoughts about the wisdom of tying herself professionally to Doyle. Working with the flakey Doyle may not be her best career move toward country music stardom.
Jenny Littleton’s Debbie is a 100 percent country stereotype—long flowing hair, cowboy boots, short skirt, and deep cleavage. Vocally, she has the country sound down pat and sings just as well the gals who belt out their numbers on the Grand Ole Opry. The same goes for Bruce Arntson’s Doyle. I didn’t find any difference between his twangy vocal delivery and what we hear from Tim McGraw, Garth Brooks, and similar country music icons.
Arntson’s
original score is generic country, no worse than what can be found on a typical
country radio station. What makes the show a hoot are Arntson’s lyrics,
especially the raunchy ones. Arntson is the Stephen Sondheim of country music
parody. His lyrics are sharp, clever, and continually surprising in their off
beat wit. Doyle and Debbie perform the songs with a straight face, elevating
the outlandish words to an even higher plane of hilarity.
Arntson runs the changes on most sacred theme of country music, broken hearted love. The best riffs on these sagas of sad romances are too R rated for explicit discussion. Yet this isn’t an off color show. There is no leering in the performances. The style is over-the-top sincerity, and the funnier for it. The songs also touch on other well-worn country music themes, like super patriotism, old time religion, and conservative political attitudes. I didn’t catch any lyrics about trains and prison, but I failed to absorb some of the rapid-fire enunciations from the stage and could have missed references to plenty of those enduring country music sacred cows.
“The Doyle and Debbie Show” runs about 90 minutes without an intermission. There is a break two-thirds of the way through the show for a fake intermission that takes the two singers into their dressing room for several tension filled minutes. Then it’s back on stage for more of Doyle’s greatest hits. The show ends with Doyle’s on-stage meltdown, something to do with his preserving the hair of his dead father. It’s a noisy bit that doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the show. That’s a small criticism compared to the pleasures of listening for an hour and a half to two talented performers shredding country music’s conventions and pretensions.
The intimate Royal George Cabaret is a perfect fit for the revue. A guitar player (Matthew Carlton) is the only other performer on the stage and he’s limited to a few lines and a bemused look. It’s all Doyle and Debbie standing in front of their microphones, bleating out songs with their hearts on their sleeves.
The revue is a whoop-and-holler show, the opening night audience reacting with nonstop boisterous approval. Even allowing for the natural good will of an opening night crowd (and the free bar service), the enthusiasm sounded genuine. This is the ultimate audience show and should be irresistible, even for those who otherwise find country music very resistible.
For the record, Kevin Depinet designed the set, Annie Freeman the costumes, Keith Parham the lighting, and Rod Milburn and Michael Bodeen the sound.
“The Doyle and Debbie Show” runs through January 8 at the Royal George Cabaret Theatre, 1641 North Halsted Street. Most performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 5 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 5 p.m. Tickets are $43.50 to $49.50. Call 312 988 9000 or visit www.doyleanddebbie.com.
The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars. October 2011
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
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Dixie’s Tupperware Party
At the Royal George Theatre
By Dan Zeff
Chicago – You want to buy some Tupperware, attend Dixie’s Tupperware Party. You want the sales pitch to include enough double and triple entendre sexual humor to make your head spin, even better.
Dixie Longate, also rumored to be playwright Kris Andersson in drag, is conducting seven Tupperware parties a week at the Royal George Cabaret Theatre. A Tupperware party is traditionally considered a gal thing, with women gathering at someone’s home to buy the plastic kitchenware products and gossip while they drink coffee and nibble deserts. It became a national phenomenon in the 1950’s and peaked in the 1970’s.
The Tupperware party may have declined in visibility in the last couple of decades but Dixie still keeps the faith. You might not buy anything at her party, but you’ll surely laugh a lot, and maybe learn something about American social history in the mid 1900’s. And Dixie’s parties are guy as well as gal friendly in that she is an equal opportunity insulter.
The show’s format is simple. Dixie makes her appearance shortly before the performance begins, schmoozing with spectators and passing out lifesaver candies. The stage is dominated by a table piled high with authentic Tupperware products. A TV monitor comes into play periodically from above the stage. Two couches on each side of the stage are occupied by pairs of male and female spectators who serve as butts of Dixie’s ostentatiously adult humor throughout the evening.
This is a show with lots of audience participation and interaction. People caught in Dixie’s crosshairs can expect to have their sexual preferences assessed as well as their intelligence questioned, especially if you are like the man on opening night who had a terrible time trying to operate a Tupperware can opener.
Dixie is a motor mouth and her humor is hit or miss. One thing it never lacks is velocity. Indeed, enhanced by a thick Alabama accent, Dixie’s stream of patter sometimes seems to move beyond the speed of sound. But be assured that if one slice of racy humor flies past you, other bits will immediately follow on its tail.
Dixie herself is a commanding figure, with a flamboyant red hairdo and a colorful miniskirt that fairly screams trailer trash. Dixie herself freely owns up to a checkered background that includes a stretch in prison. She got into the Tupperware game as a way to earn a living so she could get a parole. Dixie and Tupperware turned out to be a match made in heaven, though an R-rated heaven. She is pursuing the title of number one sales person in the company and thus far has made it to number two.
Dixie has been conducting her parties in theaters since 2004 and she’s got the patter down to a verbal science. Her enthusiasm comes across as spontaneous and her banter with spectators has an improvisational ring, but the lady has heard it all in the past six years and is ready for anything the audience throws at her. Cross wits with her at your peril, especially if you are sensitive about your sexuality. She reminds one of Dame Edna Everage, swapping Edna’s haughty superiority for a down home redneck approach to life, but in their sarcasm and knee-in-the-groin comedy, they are sisters.
“Dixie’s Tupperware Party” is really an extended infomercial for Tupperware and pretty persuasive. Catalogues and order forms are placed on the seats for the audience’s future use. I was impressed by the ingenuity and utility of many of the products Dixie demonstrated. The lady also makes a vivid case for Brownie Wise as one of the unsung feminist heroines of the twentieth century. Brownie invented the Tupperware party sales concept about 1950 and the marketing ploy become a source of empowerment for a generation of American women abruptly marginalized from their home front jobs with the end of World War II. Brownie, who died in 1992 virtually forgotten, gave countless women a way to earn their own income, endowing them with a sense of economic worth.
Toward the end of the show, Dixie turns her presentation into an exercise in positive thinking, a burst of “Triumph of the Human Spirit” sentimentality that the audience can accept or leave alone as they wish.
The opening night performance ran an uninterrupted 100 minutes, which was about 15 minutes too long. A couple of times Dixie verbally ran in place until she was able to regain her momentum. But at the top of her form, which was most of the time, she was a hoot.
“Dixie’s Tupperware Party” runs through May 15 at the Royal George Cabaret Theatre, 1641 North Halsted Street. Performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $44 and $49. Call 312 988 9000 or visit www.dixiestupperwareparty.com.
The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars. March 2011
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
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Forbidden Broadway
At the Royal George Cabaret Theatre
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—The unhappiest news of the autumn theater season comes from Gerard Alessandrini, who announced he is shutting down his “Forbidden Broadway” franchise, at least for the short term. Alessandrini can’t find enough material in the current bleak Broadway scene to supply sufficient ammunition to feed his priceless satirical revues.
Just how great a loss will be the absence of “Forbidden Broadway?” Consider the glorious production of “Forbidden Broadway: Dances with the Stars” at the Royal George Cabaret Theatre. It’s heartbreaking that we will be deprived of so much wit and intelligence in our theatrical future.
This is the second visit of “Forbidden Broadway” to the Royal George. The first show, “Forbidden Broadway: Special Victims Unit,” turned into an unexpected hit last year. The format remains the same, four supremely talented performers nailing the personalities and shows of Broadway with wicked high spirits and insight. The pace is fast and the jovial cynicism unrelenting. There are a few echoes of the previous revue, but most of the sketches and songs are mint fresh.
Alessandrini vents his satirical spleen against pretentiousness, whether in a show or in a performer. He reserves special hostility for the dumbing down of Broadway, singling out the Disney Corporation for special censure for pandering to the lowest common denominator in audience taste with such shows as “Mary Poppins” and “The Little Mermaid” (he even aims shots at the iconic “The Lion King”).
Alessandrini is the revue’s creator and writer and its co-director with William Selby. The man’s skill with song lyrics is dazzling, to be mentioned in the same breath with Stephen Sondheim (there is a Sondheim sketch that is one of the evening’s highlights). Alessandrini’s ability to come up with one clever and pungent rhyme after another is astounding. His skill at shaping those rhymes to score a continuous flow of satirical points is beyond astounding. And he’s just as ingenious with a non-musical bit, like a send-up of the Steppenwolf “Osage County” hit reduced to a no-holds-barred boxing match between the story’s mother and daughter.
In one sense, “Forbidden Broadway” is a continuous in-joke. As I noted in commenting on the first revue, one doesn’t have to be knowledgeable about the Broadway scene to enjoy the show. Still, it helps in order to fully appreciate Alessandrini’s blasts at the new Latino hip-hop musical “In the Heights” and the Lincoln Center revival of “South Pacific” along with lampooning the excesses and mannerisms of Mandy Patinkin, Patti LuPone, Kristin Chenoweth, and Sarah Brightman.
A viewer unfamiliar with these productions and performers obviously won’t be able to savor the full effect of Alessandrini’s eviscerations. But it’s likely that the audience attracted to “Forbidden Broadway” will be in touch with the material. Indeed, the opening night audience was punctuated, and marred, by numerous spectators eager to applaud and shout their approval of each skit, just to announce how hip they were to the satirical thrusts on stage.
The show takes no prisoners, even with Broadway’s biggest hits. Alessandrini has some deliciously negative views of “Wicked” and “Les Miserables” and “Hairspray.” And viewers may be forced to rethink their adulation for “Jersey Boys” after watching his disembowelment of the show.
The revue is served up by two men and two women, each of whom seems as talented as the performers they ridicule. Valerie Fagan as Sarah Brightman, Leisa Mather as Kristin Chenoweth, Mark David Kaplan as Mandy Patinkin, Kevin McGlynn as the gay stud star of “Xanadu”—all are at least on a par with the celebrities they so cheerfully skewer.
The show’s production values reside in the witty props and the riotous bull’s-eye costumes designed by Alvin Colt and David Moyer. The costume changes, including wigs and facial hair, off stage are timed in microseconds, but nary a cue was missed. Eric Walton provides the expert on-stage piano accompaniment.
Local audiences fortunately can get a double dose of “Forbidden Broadway.” The “Dancing with Stars” revue runs through through November 30. “A Forbidden Broadway Christmas” then takes over for a month starting December 3.
“Forbidden Broadway” runs through January 4 at the Royal George Cabaret Theatre, 1641 North Halsted Street. Performance times vary throughout the run. Tickets are $40 to $55. Call 312 988 9000 or visit theroyalgeorgetheatre.com .
The show gets a rating of four stars. OCT. 2008
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.