Putting the fun in feminism
‘A ... My Name is Alice’ creates clever little playlets out of sketches and songs both funny and engaging
Want to see the happy face of feminism?
Well, maybe just a rant or two to be provocative. But mostly, the political agenda in “A ... My Name Is Alice” is topped with cotton candy.
This hasn’t the sort of millennial reconstruction that recently turned Henry Higgins in Lerner and Loewe’s “My Fair Lady” into an abuser. It’s not the misplaced angst some folks feel about male-female relationships in innocent musicals like “The Music Man.”
No, this is let’s-have-fun feminism. If that style turns your crank, get to the Players’ Guild where six terrific female actors are resuscitating a
slightly dated, but always adorable revue that is polished and professional.
It’s the best thing this local company has done for several years.
Why? Because the risks are high. Breathing life into a show about 1980s women, singing their songs, telling their jokes and objectifying men could be iffy.
Though the Guild has tried to inject some modernity with the costumes and current references, they’ve mostly left this show where it belongs, bang in 1983.
Produced at New York’s Top of the Gate back then, this was never an incisive look at women fighting for equality in a male dominated world. It’s too soft-core for that.
What it is, is a sometimes daffy, sometimes delightful, feisty look at women and their world.
The Alices here — all called the same name — are a bawdy band of broads. Hopefully we can still use that word in today’s #MeToo world. It’s perfect nomenclature for the characters here.
You’ll admire and love every one of them, partly because the actors playing them — Leslie Gray, Lesley Andrew, Richelle Tavernier, Catherine Silverglen, Danielle Green and Alix Kingston — are a terrific all-girl band. Even when the material they’re given to sing and act lets them down a little, they barrel ahead, selling the mediocre along with the sublime.
A compilation of songs, sketches and monologues by the likes of comedian Anne Meara, songwriters Steve Tesich and Lucy Simon, and cabaret star Amanda McBroom, the show was conceived and directed by Julianne Moore and Joan Micklin Silver.
With so many cooks in the kitchen things don’t always jell. “Welcome to kindergarten” and “Educated Feet,” for instance, don’t click. But most often “Alice” creates clever little playlets out of sketches and songs both funny and engaging.
Though the fight for gender equality is still with us, I don’t think that’s what we take away from this little show. No, it’s the spirit of these wonderful women that follows us out of the theatre.
There’s the sketch and song by Lucy Simon and Susan Birkenhead about three hot women ogling the strip boys at a late night club. And make no mistake, it’s not their faces they’re looking at. It’s about the heat of bare male bodies, unwrapped for objectification. Their eyes firmly fixed below the belt, these women are visibly turned on by boys who drop their drawers to be admired.
Just imagine this scene today in a show where men sit in the hot seats blatantly objectifying women. Well, this is about tit for tat, so to speak.
That’s the thing about “A ... My Name Is Alice,” soft-core or not, it isn’t afraid to support women, yet make fun of them at the same time.
Take “Honeypot,” a lurid, perhaps even obscene song, sung by a woman visiting her sex therapist. She’s talking about intercourse by equating everything to food. When she said she wanted something warm in her doughnut hole, a man in front of me almost fell off his chair. Well, this is not a show for the shy.
Director David Dayler, blessed with an A cast, does a great job keeping us entertained. He’s made it his mission to let the messages ooze through the cracks.
The performers shine, collectively and in star turns. Tavernier is a terrific Honeypot, Andrew a mean faux French singer, Silverglen a madcap poet with a swan on her head and bird wings all aflutter. Green is a spot-on Mama Mae in fake-silver wig. And Kingston (the best voice in the show) breaks your heart with “Portrait,” a song about a young woman who discovers how much she loved her mother.
Then there’s Gray, a triple threat, exemplary in everything she does, giving a performance that is thoroughly professional, even when she’s simply sitting and listening to someone talk.
As a gay white man of a certain age, maybe I can’t feel what women feel. But I know I can feel what these actors do in this glorious female-centric production.
Cavils? Not many. Sometimes it’s difficult to hear the softer stuff. Sometimes the lighting is harsh. Sometimes the set is distracting.
The final word? Don’t be shy. Go see “A ... My Name Is Alice.” You don’t have to be a woman to love it.
Gary Smith has written on theatre and dance for The Spectator for more than 35 years.
Special to The Hamilton Spectator