Regrets abound in ‘Tamarie’s Merry Evening’
Everyone has three kinds of stories.
The first is the daytime story, told to brunch partners and clients, which involve overcoming obstacles and earning awards. These are success stories. They’re boring.
The second is the 6 p.m. story, told to the cocktail or dinner party, which are colorful enough to be off-therecord but never too embarrassing to reveal to a crowd. These are the stories of rivalries and romance, gossip and grandstanding. They pair well with mojitos.
Finally, there are the 2 a.m. tales. These are memories you tell only to those you’d trust with your life because they involve intimate encounters with, say, vomit, poop and genitalia. Unlike the 6 p.m. yarn, the protagonist is not in control. This is the home, naturally, of bad sex.
“Tamarie’s Merry Evening of Mistakes and Regrets” has two stories about bad sex. One is from the star of the musical, Tamarie Cooper, who has written and performed an original musical every summer for 20 years. The other comes from actor Ronnie Blaine. They are both presented as true, and I can imagine them telling these tales to a 2 a.m. gathering, the time of night when neither daytime nor early evening rules apply. Taken as autobiography, they are riveting bad sex stories, vivid and impolite and universal in that it shows someone losing control over a moment in their life.
The Catastrophic Theatre, which specializes in Absurdism, appears to revel in stories with ruined climaxes.
You know how it goes: A series of supposedly random and often incomprehensible events occur, and then it’s over, and we’ve probably learned nothing except that the world is embarrassing and chaotic.
That’s a description of both a terrible hookup and Absurdist plays. And that’s far from an insult to Absurdists.
But Cooper doesn’t believe in the bad sex story as Absurdist literature. Rather, she tells the audience over and over that this “Merry Evening” is a puerile affair and nothing more. She adds cabaret music, graceless choreography and a circus of props to the 2 a.m. story, and we are now meant to interpret these tales the way she does — as utterly lowbrow.
But lowbrow doesn’t have to mean lazy. Shock can provide some of the best comedy in art: For instance, both “Borat” and the “Jackass” films were eye-opening examinations of the clash between normality’s upholders and its destroyers.
But while there are a few moments of genuine comedy in Cooper’s tad-too-long musical montage of gags and jokes, nothing is as ambitious as it could have been. Those great bad sex stories are coated in cheesy inauthenticity. Maybe boundary-pushing isn’t the point of Cooper’s musicals. But then what is? She tells the audience that she isn’t as young as she once was, almost daring to ask the key question of the night: What does a grown-up Tamarie, and a grown-up Tamarie musical, look like?
The answer is a document of artistic arrested development. It’s a story about a group of people who used to be wild kids who are now sadly aware that even though “Merry Evening” is not jaw-dropping, it might be so for the well-mannered donor. Warning to all those: There are talking sphincters and giant walking penises.
The problem isn’t that this musical is too dumb or too silly. There’s nothing wrong with taking that path, but if you do, why not go all the way and then venture even further?
I want to see a summer Tamarie musical that offends even her. I want that 2 a.m. tale used as a launching pad for truth, experimentation and genuine risk. It could be the best show the Catastrophic puts on all year.
Right now, though, “Merry Evening” tantalizes but never satisfies. It’s the theatrical equivalent of, well, you know.