Sexual Confusion

Linda Winer wrote a column the other day expressing sympathy for Rosie O'Donnell, who only wanted to create an interesting piece of musical theatre and ended up getting publicly humiliated for her efforts. Having seen it tonight, I agree to an extent. There's a lot of good stuff in Taboo, and O'Donnell should be applauded for having had faith enough in it to spend the money on bringing it here.

And at the same time, she's gotta be spanked. Because no two bits of the good stuff in the show are in contact with each other--a lot of good performances, a lot of good jokes and a lot of good songs are trapped in a conceptual and narrative framework that is, in a word, shit.

I want to give my love (metaphorically, or however) to all of the principal cast members and many of the ensemble players--it's a freakin' tough show to do eight times a week, and it's got to be discouraging, but no one could have been holding back anything. Raul Esparza is a bona fide star yet to ascend, a distinctively cute man with amazing comic gifts, true conviction in his acting and the added bonus of a fine show voice. Jeffrey Carlson also stands out as drag queen Marilyn, creepy and self-destructive and in possession of most of the best wisecracks. Sarah Uriarte Berry actually creates the most convincing character of the evening, gradually moving from exuberant party girl to loving life partner. Euan Morton is an uncanny mimic of Boy George, Liz McCartney provides some astonishing belting, and Cary Shields is surprisingly likable in the thankless "boyfriend" role.

George O'Dowd has to be set apart just due to the nature of his role--I don't know of any other actor who has appeared in a musical stage biography of himself but not played himself. The further surprise is that he's quite good as Leigh Bowery, no longer the impressive singer he once was, but an appealing presence, an excellent comedian and clearly loved by the audience from his first entrance with the male ensemble in a dirty toilet. The high point of the show--the only time Jon really responded--was his "curtain speech," when he broke character smack in the middle of his second-act number and talked about Michael Riedel, Rosie, Broadway, politics, and whatever he felt like in general. The audience ate it up.

And his work behind the scenes is often really impressive. Most of the uptempo numbers work well (Carlson scores with "Genocide Peroxide," Berry with "Safe in the City," Shields with "I See Through You," and the whole cast with the numbers that open and close the acts). Some of the ballads have lovely music, too....

I trail off because, notwithstanding some fantastic costumes, the first part of that sentence absolutely exhausts the good things I have to say about Taboo. Wow, what a mess. To enumerate:

1) The lyrics (when we can hear them, in the ballads) and the serious parts of the libretto are ghastly. O'Dowd and Charles Busch left not a cliché unturned in their exploration of Showbiz Bio 101. Exposition is clumsy, sentiment is mawkish, and characterization is not to be found in the text. In her final solo, Berry actually has to sing the line "They say that silence equals death...," and there are similarly awkward attempts to remind us exactly why a promiscuous homosexual in the early eighties might be growing ill.

2) There is no reason whatsoever for the character of Leigh Bowery--and, by extension, the characters of Nicola and Big Sue--to be in the show. That storyline does not intersect in any way with the Boy George storyline, and as far as I can tell there aren't any intriguing parallels. (You might say that Bowery represents a nightmare future vision of a George who never grew up, but that ultimately doesn't wash--they aren't similar enough, and Bowery is ultimately lionized by the show.) The finale has the surviving characters returning to their former club for a present-day reunion, and it suddenly occurs to us that these people barely appeared together in the show and have nothing to reminisce about. Did they mean anything to each other? Can't really tell.

3) Speaking of the finale, one character who appears in it is Marcus, the boyfriend played by Shields. Reasonable enough...except that in the present-day framing device, narrators Esparza and McCartney have already explained that he is a composite of all of George's old boyfriends. Reread that last sentence a couple of times. The character is a fictional character that the narrators created to simplify the story for us, the audience, and now they're all chatting together. Are you fucking kidding me? That's incompetent playwriting. (Idea: maybe the character could change jobs, mannerisms and such for every scene, leaving the impression that the same actor was, without explanation, playing every man in George's life. Then the characters could finally be integrated in their last confrontation, and maybe then the final scene would be credible.)

4) Aside from the lousy lyrics, the problem with the ballads is that they never ever stop. After an exciting opening number, George is introduced with a lovely but slow ballad--not a good idea, but not a disaster yet. Then several other characters kill with their uptempo numbers, and then George gets another solo--also a ballad. (Idea: maybe all of the introductory songs could have been folded into the opening number, giving the show a huge send-off introducing the milieu and characters and leaving us ready to relax.) By the second act, when times are hard for the characters, everyone gets a slow number, almost in a row, during which we reconsider how much we really liked them in the first act. I think that's the function of an experienced producer: to slap any member of the creative team who suggests that a show needs another ballad.

One function, anyway. The producer is basically supposed to ensure that there's a story to tell, or at least a point to make, a reason to juxtapose whatever scenes and songs the creators choose to include. There's nothing here! Taboo is a little bit the story of Boy George, a little bit the story of Leigh Bowery--neither story told accurately enough to be valuable as biography, yet not integrated enough to be a work of speculative historical drama, and certainly not consistently entertaining on its own merits on either count.

It's good enough to not dismiss, with quite a few salvageable things. But yes, it is a disaster. Shame on the critics for holding back and not telling us so.