Meals on Heels
Richard Rodgers, the late musical composer whose 100th birthday is being feted this year in cabarets and concert halls across the country, reportedly believed that musical theater was so popular because it was so far removed from real life. That makes it easy to embrace the trend that recently brought to stages such quirky and dark musical comedies as Urinetown and Bat Boy, both of which were predated by the equally strange musical Eating Raoul, now at Just Off Broadway.
Paul Bartel’s 1982 cult film, on which the musical is based, chronicles a boring couple, Paul and Mary Bland, whose financial straits are unhappily juxtaposed with their dreams of running a restaurant. Through a berserk chain of events, they turn their apartment into the headquarters of a sexual-fantasy service. But this isn’t hook enough for Bartel — he also has them robbing and killing all the customers and enlisting the title character as an amoral third party. It’s perfect material for those grungy Off-Broadway spaces in Greenwich Village — and Kansas City’s J.O.B. space on Central — that give anti-commercial theatergoers hope.
Two words describe why this Eubank Productions piece is a winner: Natalie Hiatt. Playing Mary Bland (to Nicolas Greenlee’s Paul), the meek nurse who becomes a hooker and a murderess, Hiatt is extraordinary. She’s so talented and charismatic that you understand what the producers of Best Musical Tony winner Thoroughly Modern Millie felt upon discovering chorus girl Sutton Foster — and prompted them to fire the star and put Foster in the lead. Hiatt has the squeaky appeal and formidable lung power of some blessed mutant who is equal parts Bernadette Peters and Jennifer Tilly but entirely her own creation.
The setting is Los Angeles, circa 1969. On a day that changes everything in the Bland world, Mary is deflated by unwelcome sexual advances from a doctor at the hospital and a loan executive at a bank. Paul’s indignities include being pickpocketed and having his car stolen. That night, they encounter swingers who mistake their pad for the sex den down the hall. They are appalled by the shenanigans from which they’ve been excluded but embark on a horrible plot after a freak accident ends with one of the partiers lying dead in their living room. Encouraged by one of the guests, Donna the Dominatrix (Ashley Otis), they begin soliciting johns from a personals ad promising fetishists discreet release.
Mary proceeds to play a ruler-wielding nun, a nubile cheerleader and Ginger Rogers, but the customers don’t get satisfied — they get killed by a bop on the head from a frying pan. In the midst of the Blands’ scheme, they enlist their apartment’s maintenance man, Raoul (Eric Archer), who moonlights as a performer in a Latin nightclub (where you get to hear the best song, “Hot Monkey Love”). No one’s ever the wiser as the body count rises, but Raoul gets a little too interested in Mary for Paul’s taste, leading to a final scene that explains the culinary connection of the title.
Director Kevin Eubank has his cast of seventeen wear all kinds of psychedelic clothing and foists tie-dye lighting upon us in one of the first numbers, “La La Land.” The dancing (credited to four choreographers, including Hiatt) is impossibly energetic and creative; it borders on stylistic overload but never crosses that line. And though not everybody can be called a dancer, each performer can deliver the message. The eye-popping costumes are fun, the set pieces crude yet effective.
The teen-aged Eubank is the enfant terrible responsible for the production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch recently mounted at the Alanz Theatre (which a notable theater personality described as “better than the Unicorn’s”). Working with the kind of huge cast that only nonpaying theater gigs can afford, Eubank moves his actors around like a professional guru three times his age. Even the show’s technical clumsiness doesn’t deter Hiatt; at one performance, she charmingly fetched the telephone from the wings, where it had been left by some forgetful stagehand.
Among the standouts in the ensemble, some of whom have appeared in productions at American Heartland Theatre and the Coterie, are Otis as the whip-wielding yet sweet Donna; ensemble member Tyler Parsons (who also plays Ginger Rogers, impersonating her because of some childhood weirdness); and Bethany Ziskind, who gives Yolanda, the purring club owner, a fierce feline sensibility. It would have been grand to hear Jed Feuer and Boyd Graham’s spirited score rendered by singers a bit more forceful than Greenlee and Archer. Bartel’s lyrics are often drowned out by the music. But with Natalie Hiatt’s witty and accomplished performance, Eating Raoul offers ample reason to sample most of the dishes in this oddball buffet.
