Theatre in Review: Fixing Frankie (Little Red Engine Theatre at ART/New York Theatres)

	Greyson Chapman. Photo: Russ Rowland

Frankie Scordato doesn't need fixing so much as he could use a little fleshing out. Joe Langworth and Steve Marzullo's new musical is the story of a gay man's progress from wide-eyed youth to haunted middle age, remaining strangely anonymous over decades of social change. A lot happens around him, but, curiously, almost nothing sticks, largely because Frankie is such a blank. The authors, seeking to create a highly relatable everyman, have instead invented an empty vessel, passively looking on while his loved ones undergo all sorts of trials. He makes a distinctly odd central figure.

We meet Frankie as a grade-schooler growing up among the stereotypes in New Jersey. His parents are loud, gesturing, kvetching Italian Americans. ("Finish your plate," his mother snaps. "There are children starving in Africa." Never heard that one before.) Then again, Frankie is hardly an original; with his fondness for dolls, his fashion-forward obsessions, and his idolization of Bea Arthur in her Maude period, he is a textbook sitcom gay-in-training. (Confirming his outsider status is a tasteless running gag about a medical condition resulting in only one dropped testicle.) As his father gruffly points out, "Face it. There's a pink elephant in the room."

The issue only becomes more obvious when Frankie enters high school, where he bonds with Margaret, a big, boisterous good-time gal who wants to be a cabaret star. Barred from fashion school by his father, who doesn't want him hanging around with "poofs," he ends up at Hunter, where a feature he places in the college paper gets him a job as a restaurant reviewer in The Village Voice -- a career in which he displays an utter lack of interest.

By now, it's the '80s, and Frankie is making the bar scene, cueing numbers in which guys in skimpy shirts eye him provocatively -- not that he seems to be having a good time. True love comes calling in the form of Walter, a dishy mergers-and-acquisitions specialist who eventually gets tired of playing second fiddle to Frankie and Margaret's Will and Grace-style pseudo marriage. (With the AIDS epidemic looming, Walter gets dispatched, thanks to a bizarre plot twist in which he appears to be the only homosexual in America who doesn't know about the HIV test.) Uninterested in outside relationships, Frankie and Margaret decide to have a baby -- "You'd be an amazing father!" she announces, based on no evidence whatsoever -- leading to a tragic (and soap operatic) twist outside a fertility clinic. Trust me; if you want to reach old age, you should give Frankie a wide berth.

As Frankie, George Psomas, an attractive presence with a nice voice, wanders through the action, looking bemused, presumably giving directors Langworth and Michael Blatt what they want. But the character's total lack of introspection is off-putting. He has little or no social life, and his affair with Walter seems surprisingly one-sided. His devotion to Margaret is summed up when he says, "She was my person," but their relationship often seems a matter of convenience. Does he ever wonder why he can't be with a man long-term? Or why does he, given his major daddy issues, agree so flippantly to fatherhood? Longworth's book often struggles to find drama where none exists: The first act ends with a spat when Frankie takes Margaret to the famous club Limelight, upsetting her when he leaves with a guy. (This cues a rather wan first-act finale, "We All Love Who We Love.") But what did she think would happen?

Anyway, Laura Pavles is charming as Margaret, happily evading some of the character's more pathetic qualities. Austin Colburn is an attention-getter both as the tragic Walter and as Frankie's younger, more politically committed Grindr date, who might be boyfriend material. Greyson Chapman has plenty of pizzazz as the young Frankie, begging the question of how he grows up to be such a dour adult. (There's a nifty bit in which Chapman hands over a backpack to Psomas, signaling the passage of the years.) Felicia Finley gives things a welcome jolt with each appearance as Sister Agatha, who presides over Frankie's school days with an iron rod, ultimately becoming the personification of his guilty conscience.

The modest production features Josh Iacovelli's set design, dominated by screens that Andy Evan Cohen fills with images of Catholic schools, New York streets, and doctors' offices. Elizabeth Ektafaei's costumes, Aiden Berzark's lighting, and Sun Hee Kil's sound design are all solid.

It's typical of the show that Frankie takes offense at one of his father's remarks ("Your sisters have their own families to worry about"), complaining, "Wait, just because I'm not married with kids means I don't have a family?" Well, by this point, Walter and Margaret are long gone, and, in the next scene, we find him in bed on Christmas Eve with a fellow he barely knows, so maybe Dad is onto something. (He has also quit his job, so he doesn't even have colleagues.) The musical attempts to answer the question of why Frankie needs fixing. The real question should be: Who is this guy, anyway? --David Barbour