Theatre in Review: This Ain't No Disco (Atlantic Theater Company)

	Peter LaPrade and cast. Photo: Ben Arons.

This new musical wants to take us back to those glamorous nights at Studio 54 in its Liza-Halston-Andy heyday, but the version of the legendary pleasure palace conjured here is a haunted house inhabited by the most insubstantial of shades. Someone could have made of this subject a kind 1970s version of Cabaret, offering a coruscating vision of A-list celebrities and their beautiful attendants drinking, dancing, and snorting their way into collective oblivion while New York sinks into bankruptcy and chaos, symbolized by blackouts, episodes of looting, and Son of Sam's killing spree. What this blue-chip creative team has come up with, however, is surprisingly stolid; a little of the old divine decadence might have pepped things up a bit.

This Ain't No Disco focuses on two innocents from Queens who get lost in the vortex of money, drugs, and fame at the heart of the Studio 54 scene. Chad, a busboy at the club -- he and his colleagues work shirtless, in tiny gym shorts and white tube socks -- fled his abusive father and, delivering drugs to keep body and soul together, met Steve Rubell, the club's co-owner, who offered him gainful employment. (One of the show's most skin-crawling numbers features Rubell dandling Chad on his knee, singing "Be Like a Son.") When Chad's father dies intestate (his mother is long gone), he inherits the family home and business, which he liquidates; flush with cash, he returns to the club as a guest, dressed from head to toe in gold. In swoops Binky, a predatory press agent who swears she can make him a Page Six regular. Renaming him Rake, she launches him as a kind of proto-Keith Haring pop artist; when it ends in dismal failure, she cooks up an even more desperate scheme, staging their marriage at Studio 54 in a bid at becoming the next It couple.

Meanwhile, Sammy, a young, black single mother (and one of Chad's high school classmates), gets taken up by The Artist -- Andy Warhol, to you -- who promotes her as a pop-music diva. Sammy already shoots up on occasion, but while fretting that she is staying out too late, running around and neglecting her son, The Artist starts plying her with prescription diet pills, and you already know how that will end: Stardom looms, along with the prospect of becoming a train wreck a la Garland or Joplin.

For all its flash and glitter, This Ain't No Disco is really a cautionary tale about babes in the wood who are preyed upon by wolves proffering fame, only to realize, bitterly and nearly too late, that it's all tinsel and real happiness lies elsewhere. Rather than conjuring up any of the great disco anthems of the era, the period pop hit I kept thinking of was Charlene's 1977 weeper, "I've Been to Paradise (But I've Never Been to Me"). But Chad and Sammy are little more than blanks, clueless even by the standards of musical-theatre ingenues. The fact that they have seedy histories -- in addition to Chad's many problems, Sammy was impregnated by her stepfather -- does little to give them sharper profiles; between them, they don't have a single distinctive bit of character detail.

Other characters prowl around in the background, including The DA, a rotund, politically ambitious lawyer who leers at the busboys, goes down on his staffers, and plots Rubell's downfall. (Ian Schrager, Rubell's partner in Studio 54, is totally absent from the proceedings -- largely, one supposes, because he is alive and might be predisposed to sue.) Meech and Landa, a pair of coat-check girls and aspiring artists, are lovers who figure in an undernourished subplot that comes to a head when Landa dons a suit and says, "I think I'm a guy." Meech sings, "I fell in love with you and not your chromosome," and that's the end of that issue. It's hard to believe that three book writers -- Stephen Trask, Peter Yanowitz, and Rick Elice -- labored to create this cadre of cartoon figures. (Trask wrote the songs for Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Yanowitz was a member of that show's band, and Elice's credits include co-authorship of Jersey Boys and The Cher Show.)

The score, by Trask and Yanowitz, has its moments, although a show that spends so much time on the dance floor rarely acquires an authentic disco beat. Among the highlights are "Fifteen Minutes Later," sung by Chad after his flash of stardom has flamed out. The indefatigable Binky has an amusing anthem titled "I'm Not Done Yet," in which she plots yet another return from ignominy. And Sammy has an appealingly tough-minded ballad, "Soldier On," delivered when she enters the sadder-but-wiser stage of her career. With such generic characters, however, Trask and Yanowitz's songs are deficient in the sort of detail that could have made them come alive. Nobody is interested in creating true rhymes -- matching "sunglasses" with "Onassis" is about as good as it gets -- and banalities abound. Rubell, fiddling with Chad's shorts, sings, "I want you to know me/I want you to blow me." The opening number, "A Dance Floor is Waiting," is almost incomprehensible -- both the sound mixing and actors' diction improve later on -- except for long stretches of the company singing the word "glory" over and over again. The construction of the lyrics is often awkwardly unlike normal speech: "Busboy angels are skating/Glistening pectorals smooth/The beat and the pulse creating/An anthem your soul for to soothe." That last line sounds like it was translated from Middle English.

As directed by Darko Tresnjak, This Ain't No Disco moves quickly, possibly to prevent unwanted thoughts from arising about the book's general implausibility; Camille A. Brown's choreography is loaded with fairly standard disco moves, although, even with some rather strenuous pelvic action, they feel a tad antiseptic. Missing from the production is the sense of exhilaration -- of getting away with something -- that was the main allure of places like Studio 54.

The young, gifted cast gives it their all. Chad is little more than a pair of starry eyes in short shorts -- he's the most wholesome hustler you've ever seen -- leaving Peter LaPrade to rely on his appealing voice and considerable charm. (It's interesting that the show never gives Chad a moment of romantic and/or sexual attraction; his career in prostitution is over quickly, and otherwise he only has eyes for Sam, his platonic friend. The people in this fantasy Studio 54 talk about sex, but they certainly don't engage in it much.) Against the odds, Samantha Marie Ware makes a strong impression as Sam, who looks on the spectacle unfolding around her with doubting eyes, even as she turns into a pill-popping showbiz phony. Sporting a series of angel-winged coiffures that could have been lifted from Hedwig, of Angry Inch fame -- Mike Potter is responsible for the period-accurate hair designs -- Chilina Kennedy's Binky is an amusingly sharp-elbowed striver. Theo Stockman's Rubell is a creepy overaged boy with a set of Brooklyn vowels as broad as the Atlantic Theater stage. He lives to make outrageous entrances, appearing at Chad and Binky's wedding in a glitter yarmulke, and, on the club's closing night, sporting a crown of thorns and he may be the most authentic thing in the show. As The Artist, Will Connolly is little more than a pair of sunglasses, a manifestly fake platinum wig, and flat-affect vocal delivery, until he tears into the eleven o'clock number, "One Night, Terpsichore," and it becomes clear that he has rather more to offer than the role allows.

This Ain't No Disco features what very well may be the most elaborate production design ever seen on the stage of the Atlantic's Linda Gross Theater. Jason Sherwood's set is dominated by a wrapround two-level structure of scaffolding, the upstage portion of which can travel down to shrink the playing area. (It is also covered in LED tape, to intentionally tacky effect.) The set and ceiling are filled with signs for Studio 54, Chock Full o' Nuts, triple-X porno emporiums, and such iconic images as the Brooklyn Bridge. Each of these can be backlit and can function as a surface for Aaron Rhyne's projections of graffiti, chain-link fences, and other details. Ben Stanton has placed lighting units everywhere, including a couple of bars that lower in, like traffic guards at railroad tracks. The designer alternately carves out the actors, creates dance-floor pandemonium, and, in one especially theatrical moment, reverts to a stark-white work-light look to signal that the years-long party is ending. Sarah Laux's costumes are perfectly in period, making good use of the not-found-in-nature fabrics that were in favor in those days. The sound designer, Emily Lazar, working with electronic instruments in a highly reverberant space, strives to maintain intelligibility, but most of the chorus numbers are hard to make out.

Overall, This Ain't No Disco perplexes. In this portrait of New York nightlife in an especially notorious era, the thrill of celebrities mixing with everyday mortals, gays kicking back with straights, the sheer energy produced by a cocktail of music and sexual freedom (and yes, drugs and plenty of decadent behavior) is obscured. There are several numbers reminding us that the unglamorous were left to stew outside the gates of paradise, as if this was a grave injustice. I never went to Studio 54, but I was well enough acquainted with the club life of the period to know what's missing in terms of glamour and a newfound sense of freedom. This Ain't No Disco ends with most of the good characters settling for surprisingly serene -- and often sexless -- domestic arrangements, a reward, apparently, for remaining pure in heart. (Actually, they don't know what is about to hit them. The 1980s, with its attendant horrors of disease, addiction, unbridled capitalism, and racial/social tensions, is right around the corner.) The real Studio 54, like any good club of the era, throbbed with possibility, set to a disco beat; this show only throbs with earnestness. -- David Barbour