A short time ago, a chat buddy, who’s become a real world friend – I call him Malameena now, which is a play on his chat handle – asked me if I wanted to go dinner and the theatre. I said yes, and since I knew we’d be joined by his best friend (Vicky) and her husband (Rick), I knew it would be a fun evening. I’d met Vicky and Rick several weeks before at a cookout at Malameena’s, and we’d had a fun time.
On the program for the evening was a musical called Insignificant Others, a small production that I’d heard about and was curious about. I knew it was some mix of gay/str8 stories, but didn’t know much about it. I didn’t read the reviews beforehand, so I went in fresh. When I realized it was just a few days after the parade, it seemed consistent with the whole Pride Week theme.
I don’t know many locals who go to Pier 39 on purpose. It’s one of the biggest tourists traps in the history of mankind. Not only was the show there, so was our restaurant. Double whammy. We had dinner at Swiss Louis. Our food was quite good, and I was fairly confident that I would explode by the end. Fortunately, we had time to wander a bit before getting seated at the theatre.
There were t-shirts and CD and other paraphernalia. It was interesting.
I think the theatre was where they used to do the “Earthquake Demo” on Pier 39 years ago. Whenever the lead actress moved, WE certainly moved. And she wasn’t THAT big.
What can I say about Insignifcant Others? I gave my opinion at the half-way point to Vicky, and she said that’s what the reviews she’d read had said: Tales of the City meets Rent.
I mean, the parallels were NOT masked. One of the Tales books is called Significant Others. The lead character marches into SF from Cleveland! She’s naive. One of her best friends is a browner, gurrrrrlier Michael “Mouse” Toliver. Then the show moves along and the Mouse character morphs oh-so-not-subtly into Angel from Rent. (And I’ll say this … the actor would have made a *fine* Angel.)
The first half of the first act is just … well … painful. It’s all disjointed, and it doesn’t make any sense. The Angel/Mouse character is particularly perplexing and vexing. You can sort of guess what’s going on, but he’s just so *randomly* tragic, it doesn’t make any sense. And, of course, the end of the first act is SO Angel, it was almost painful to watch, and not in a good way. (His return to stage was far less moving than what is done in Rent.) Also, Eric’s solo in the “club” is pleasant, but I was scratching my head as to why it was there, or how it moved the story along. The song was agreeable, but had nothing to do with anything else going on …
Now that said … somewhere in the middle of the first act, we get to a song called “Plumbing,” I believe. Hilarious. The lead actress finally had a vehicle she could sink her teeth into … so to speak. A little later, there were a series of vignettes about Starbucks – implied Nazi-style takeover of many things in the presentation made it funny. They had Starbucks partnering with everyone from Safeway (true) to JiffyLube (false … so far). The lead played a stereotyped German barrista-a-la-nazi-woman … it was fun.
The first 8 times. That’s another problem the show has. Too repetitive. The songs are often about 2 verses too long, and the sight gags are repeated about 2 times too often. The first Starbuck’s slam was funny, when the Safeway logo appeared inside the Starbuck’s (projected on the back of the stage). The last one with Jiffylube in the middle would have been *hilarious* had it been 2-3 sight-gags earlier …
All of this is no small irony with Starbucks apparently announcing thousands of layoffs – although, that is just something I heard in chatting today.
My hat is off to the woman playing the lead, and to some extent to the guy playing Luke/Mouse/Angel. The Luke actor plays it a little TOO over the top. There isn’t that much girl in ANY five women, five drag queens, and five Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence … combined. (With no offense intended to any of those groups.)
I actually think this play could be a *lot* of fun with another rewrite. It needn’t be such a sledgehammer on the head in copying Tales and Rent. Right now, I’ll be generous and give it 3 Stars out of 5. If you go, be prepared for several wonderful moments, and some wonderful laughs, but they are often far apart.
The most disturbing thing of the evening, though, was finding out that Vicky hasn’t read nor seen any of the Tales of the Citystuff. I’m demanding Malameena’s Queer Card back … such a bad homo …
