Theatre in Review

	Top: Dr. Sex. Photo: Carol Rosegg. Bottom: The Safety Net.

Off Broadway: Dr. Sex (Peter Norton Space):
The Safety Net (Broken Watch Theatre Company):
Silk Stockings (Florence Gould Hall)

Nine months ago, when I saw Bill Condon's quietly moving film Kinsey, I hardly imagined that I would soon see the life of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey turned into a bouncy musical, with songs titled "Swinging' for Science" and "That Dirty Book." Such are the times we live in, however, and Dr. Sex comes to New York from Chicago, trailing a sheaf of rave reviews and a passel of Joseph Jefferson Awards. What's next? The Kraft-Ebbing story, with Nathan Lane?

Anyway, the principal--really, the only--joke in Dr. Sex is the gap between the serious subject matter and the Jerry Herman treatment that authors Larry Bortniker and Sally Deering have applied to it. The show follows the general outlines of Kinsey's life, while playing fast and loose with the facts. We see Kinsey evolving from an expert on gall wasps to a collector of data on sexual behavior, stunning the country with his findings. Since he's an academic, however, most of the first act plays like one of those Twenties' musicals filled with singing collegians. "See you all at the chastity pep rally!" shouts one eager co-ed, just so we get the idea that Midwesterners are repressed. Soon, Kinsey (Brian Noonan in a game performance) is being chased by Clara (Jennifer Simard), the lusty co-ed who has a lot more than gall wasps on her mind. Even after a thunderingly successful wedding night, however, there's the little matter of the professor's nude camping trips with male students.....

Before you can say ménage à trois, Kinsey and Clara are shacked up with Wally (Christopher Corts), an eager young researcher with a thing for Clara. The rest of the action consists of Clara smoldering jealously while Kinsey and Wally travel the US, conducting their "research." It's basic sketch-comedy stuff--Carol Burnett could have wrapped it up in between commercial interruptions. The numbers range from the silly ("1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6," an inventory of Kinsey's basic categories of sexual identity) to even sillier (a ballad titled "I'm in Love with a Zoology Professor") to the extremely silly ("Pharoah's Tomb," in which Kinsey learns a thing or two from the patrons of a Chicago sex club). Throughout, the kick-up-your-heels approach trivializes the material without yielding anything fresh, and the jokes are, well, limp. (When an angry dean interrupts Kinsey's sex class, the latter says, "We were in the middle of coitus--and you interrupted us!")

With a haircut that looks like a Fuller Brush on Viagra, Noonan gives it everything he's got, performing one number semi-nude, pretending to be ravished by the chorus, and generally carrying on like the overenthusiastic narrator of a Fifties hygiene film. Simard, trained in the school of Forbidden Broadway, spins some laughs out of the mildest jokes (surveying the participants of an orgy, she sighs, "I'll just tell mother they're exchange students"); she's quite a sight, vacuuming in a peignoir as she slinks through a torch song about the absent men in her life. As Wally, Corts smiles, sings, and dances with equal amounts of charm. Indeed, all three know how to sell a song, and it must be said that the rest of the cast projects such confidence that you'd never know that director Pamela Hunt left before the opening.

Rob Bissinger's unit set, with a set of steps and plenty of red drapery, augmented by a couple of drops and some furniture, is acceptable, and if John Carver Sullivan's costumes are occasionally vague about period details, you've got to love the blue and green striped bathrobes for the group-sex number. Richard Winkler's super-saturated lighting works hard to create a steamy atmosphere. The sound design, by Michael Ward and Tony Smolenski IV, is notably clear and unintrusive, which can't have been easy, as the band is located far upstage.

I'm not at all against the current craze for self-referential comedy musicals--if the material is good and Jack O'Brien is directing them. But there's silly and then there's inane. Dr. Kinsey, an expert at categories, would know where to file this one.

In contrast to the cheerfully synthetic goings on at Dr. Sex, there's The Safety Net, which puts honesty at such a premium that playwright Christopher Kyle risks alienating the audience altogether. David, Kyle's protagonist, is a New York-based corporate lawyer on the edge of making partner; at the play's opening, he's off to Indianapolis for the funeral of his adopted brother, a lost soul whose life has come to an abrupt end in a car crash. At the service, David learns that his brother was living with LaShonda, a single mother who is struggling to overcome her addictions and get a dental hygienist degree. He also learns that LaShonda is carrying his brother's child.

Things get much more complicated from there, as David begins probing his brother's past, neglecting his career and his neurotic wife Sonya as he gets more involved in La Shonda's manifold problems. Is David really trying to help LaShonda, or is he really trying resolve the feelings of guilt and alienation that have dogged him all his life? The answer to this question will have a destabilizing effect on his marriage and career.

In his effort to avoid false tears, Kyle can sometimes err in the other direction. David's family can seem a little too dry-eyed and analytical about the tragedy in their midst. At least one scene appears to end in the middle, and he could have allowed for a more emotional climax. At the same time, he spins his sorrowful tale with much skill, creating a vivid portrait of a family riven by many of the class and economic divisions that cut through our society. He offers probing questions about individual responsibility and the limits of love that resonate after the play is over.

Under Martha Banta's direction, the entire cast gives notably lucid performances. Jason Pugatch is a first-rate David, especially in a monologue in which he admits to the limits of his taste for emotional involvement. Tinashe Kajese is touching as LaShonda, who is capable, in her more sober moments, of delivering some quietly devastating truths. Eva Kaminsky brings a much-needed note of sympathy to the role of Sonya. Also fine are Mark Setlock as David's high-school friend who takes LaShonda under his wing; Maren Perry as an adoption counselor with whom David locks horns, and Peggy Scott as David's tough-minded mother.

This is a no-budget production, but set designer J. Wiese makes clever use of swiveling panels to allow for fast scenic transitions. Cora Levin's costumes, Miriam Nilofa Crowe's lighting, and Jill B. C. Duboff's sound are all perfectly adequate. As plays go, The Safety Net is more a short story than an epic, but, in its quietly powerful way, it makes for an engrossing two hours.

London's Lost Musicals series of staged readings comes to New York with 1955's Silk Stockings, Cole Porter's last Broadway show. This spoof of Soviet-Western relations, based on the Greta Garbo film Ninotchka, was realized under war-zone conditions, with, among other things, the firing of librettists George S. Kaufman and Leueen McGrath and second lead Yvonne Adair, and an ever-lengthening tour, during which leading lady Hildegarde Neff continued performing while afflicted with measles. All this for a run of 478 performances and notices like Walter Kerr's remark, "If Can-Can could, I suppose Silk Stockings will."

Still, the book still sparkles with malicious political zingers. A Commissar of Arts, looking up a colleague, asks for a copy of Who's Still Who. Another apparatchik, informed that Prokofiev is dead, cries, "I didn't even know he had been arrested!" And Porter's score is slyly impudent throughout, filled with typically brilliant wordplay. Among the most amusing numbers are "Stereophonic Sound," a spoof of Hollywood trends; a jazzy little item called "The Red Blues," and the suave title tune. Porter, the dirty old man, is also on display in "Josephine," about Napoleon's empress, who, we are told, had agitating eyes, titillating thighs, lubricating lips, and undulating hips, "plus many other good points as well."

As the lady commissar sent to Paris to retrieve a dallying composer, only to fall in love with champagne and the City of Light, Valerie Cutko is an arrestingly strange-yet-chic presence with strong comic timing; she also works wonders with the most problematic song, "Without Love," turning the rather sexist lyrics into the heedless thoughts of a woman touched by pleasure for the first time. Daniel Gerroll has a fine satiric swagger as the American agent who romances her. If neither lead is a great singer, they're easily the equals of Don Ameche and Neff on the original cast album. As a waterlogged Hollywood swimming star, Nina Hennessey tries hard, but the role cries out for Debbie Gravitte. As three fun-loving commissars, Tom Mardirosian, Ben Ari, and Wally Dunn steal the show in their rendition of "Siberia," where "you can bet all right/that your Christmas will be white."

As opposed to the Encores! Series, which features streamlined books and full orchestras, Lost Musicals offers one piano and the original text, presented uncut. While one appreciates director Ian Marshall Fisher's desire to give us everything, he could certainly pick up the pace a bit; at three hours, the fun starts to wear thin, especially in the latter scenes, which wrap up the story so hastily they barely make sense. Still, it's a fascinating experience for anyone who loves musical theatre history, and, oh, those songs!--David Barbour