Theatre in Review: Nicole Travolta is Doing Alright (Soho Playhouse)For someone whose life until now has been a series of trainwrecks, Nicole Travolta is mighty good company. A demi-celebrity, thanks to a minor career in sitcoms, she is also the "nepo-niece" of a certain film star. Or, as she puts it, "Yes, my uncle was in the movies Look Who's Talking One and Too." Clearing the air, she adds, "And no, I am not a Scientologist. I actually couldn't even afford to be." This is her way of bringing up the show's central topic, the avalanche of credit card debt she heaped upon herself, unleashing a torrent of mortifying consequences. Nicole Travolta is Doing Alright is a surprisingly amusing tale of woe starring a perpetual Cinderella who, lacking the accoutrements of a fairy godmother and prince, relies on an extreme form of retail therapy. Thanks to her grandmother, a bookie who runs afoul of the FBI, and her mother, who married "the cheapest Travolta" (a union that ended in bankruptcy), Nicole is, from an early age, urged to buy her troubles away. She quickly learns to equate possessions with love, the appearance of wealth with worldly success. Already in the hole for tens of thousands, she splurges on a wedding, the total cost of which is "equivalent to that of a starter home in Orlando, Florida." As one of the many subtitles projected on the set's upstage wall notes, "Debt Becomes Her." Growing up poor yet adjacent to wealth, Nicole's cognitive dissonance is titanic: Barely getting by with her divorced mother -- at one point, they are reduced to living with her school's abusive math teacher -- her uncle takes "on private planes with bedrooms! To houses on islands!" At Disneyland, she is allowed access to "Minnie Mouse's private quarters." Turning eighteen, armed with six credit cards of the twenty she applied for, she sets off on a years-long spree that, following her mother's template, lands her in divorce court, drowning in red ink. More legal troubles follow; simply avoiding process servers becomes a never-ending task. With her acting career semi-stalled and her legal problems mounting, Nicole begins her climb toward solvency via a gig as "a spray-tan artiste." The job provides her with access to show-business worthies, allowing her to dream of being "an SNL mid-season hire." But the big money is in house calls, so, tanning equipment in hand, soon she is catering to various bizarre characters, skirting (and sometimes causing) disaster. She accidentally crashes one client's chandelier, putting her in an even deeper financial hole. Then there's the guy who books a session for 6:35 (subsequently putting it off to 6:56 and 7:04), whose penthouse is filled with hockey gear and Popples, "a stuffed animal toy that every four-year-old girl had in 1988." Has she been summoned to the home of Jason Voorhees, of the Halloween film franchise? She is only too glad to escape from what, she is certain, is her serial killer moment. Nicole wins us over, largely because she is brutally honest about her failings and has a ripe sense of her life's absurdities. We laugh at her, but she laughs first. Leaving her mother's house, she announces, "I was 16 and on my own in Orlando. But I knew I was going to be okay because I had a boyfriend and he looked like a member of NSYNC." Making like an airline attendant, she describes her spray tan technique, adding, "In the seat back pocket in front of you is a menu of different shades ranging from Kim Kardashian to Donald Trump." Describing how her family name haunts her, she recalls one tanning client announcing, "Never in a million years did I ever imagine that I would be naked in front of basically John Travolta." Indeed, the script, co-written with Paula Christensen, is filled with loopy, yet apt, observations, including a running gag about her Home Depot credit card (well, they had these cute Santas...) and accurate imitations of Jennifer Aniston, Drew Barrymore, and Sara Jessica Parker in her Carrie Bradshaw mode. She also gives us a credible John Travolta, aping his big dance moment from Saturday Night Fever. This is followed by the admission that her director had to teach her the dance, which will give you a glimpse of Christensen and Margarett Perry's contributions to the staging. The sole credited designer is Scott Bogle, who is responsible for lighting and sound. The former is better than usual for Soho Playhouse, and the latter is filled with various effects (breaking glass, cash registers, a Hallelujah Chorus of Travoltas) and musical selections ranging from Handel to Spandau Ballet. I can imagine a deeper version of this show that allows Nicole to delve more deeply into her family's tangled history and to probe, among other things, her disastrous first marriage, but this is a breezy entertainment designed to showcase her knack for turning trauma into stand-up hilarity, and on that level it succeeds. "I am slowly learning to live inside of my own bronzed skin," she admits, proving Nicole Travolta is surely doing alright at last. --David Barbour 
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