Couples trip: ‘Lucy and Charlie’s Honeymoon’ at Lookingglass and ‘Passing Strange’ at Theo Ubique
Aurora Adachi-Winter and Matthew C. Yee. Photo by Matthew C. Yee.
If your summer needs a few glugs of Tabasco with that tall glass of lemonade, Lookingglass’s world-premiere production of Lucy and Charlie’s Honeymoon has got your spice, because, boy howdy, Matthew C. Yee’s full-throttle shoot-’em-up farce is chock full of tang.
It starts innocently enough: Lucy (Aurora Adachi-Winter) and Charlie (Matthew C. Yee)—both first-generation Asian Americans; both burdened by familial and societal expectations to become, as they put it, “violin-playing doctors”; both fascinated by American cowboy and outlaw imagery—met in the middle of a barfight (that they started), fell head over heels in love with each other, and eloped then and there. Now out of money and the honeymoon far from over, they’re headed down the road into the very heart of American outlaw territory,
So, yes, hilarity ensues. At least until the pair stumble upon a very real enemy (Doug Pawlik) and the very real victim in his clutches (Harmony Zhang). Actually, no, even then, hilarity ensues. Even as the whole shebang looks in a grimily-Windexed driver-side mirror back at America’s self-image, one that abhors and loves an outlaw, one that shuns sex and fetishization yet flop-sweats in desperation over it, one with a storage cube loaded with skeletons of minorities that we hope to God no one will bring up in polite company.
Well, Lucy and Charlie’s Honeymoon ain’t polite company.
Kinda like a crispy-fried, even more peripatetic Hedwig and the Angry Inch, if it be fair to play the comparison game for this fiendishly singular piece. Comparison is especially unfair as regards this ensemble, for there’s no comparison: this is music-comedy ensemble cohesion firing on all cylinders. (Direction by Amanda Dehnert; intimacy direction by Gaby Labotka; violence by R+D Choreography; each one indispensable in achieving that goal.)
As for Yee’s songs: it turns out country/folk’s music’s blunt matter-of-factness (“I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die”, anyone?) is exactly what one needs to keep tabs on ten characters zooming hither and thither across the Southwest in very fast cars. That said, though Lookingglass billed Lucy and Charlie’s Honeymoon as a musical, at this juncture, it feels more like a play with music. Perhaps being so matter-of-fact, the songs aren’t glimpses into the characters as they are pleasingly drawling respites from the mania. (Hell, that strategy worked fine for Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.) There are also some pretty long stretches between numbers , and—actors, forgive me—this feels like a high-energy piece that’s best done in one act, not two. So vis-a-vis musicals vs. plays with music, it’s a question of more songs, or spacing and pacing what’s already there.
Though if houses for subsequent productions are anything like the one on press night, it might be difficult to think spacing and pacing, thinking of the work as a text. On press night, the laughs probably added a solid ten, fifteen minutes to the run time. With us handily distracted, Lucy and Charlie made off with all our hearts.
Lucy and Charlie’s Honeymoon runs through July 16th at Water Tower Water Works, 821 N. Michigan Ave. For tickets or more information, please call (312) 337-0665 or visit lookingglasstheatre.org.
The Company. Photo by Jay Towns Photography.
“They change the sky, not their soul, who run across the sea.” It’s a tale as old as Horace; it’s certainly as old as Pippin, at least. If one means to tell this tale again, they better have some X-factor: a unique perspective, high style, or, at the very least, kickassery.
All of which Passing Strange—the piece and the Theo Ubique production has in abundance.
The title comes from Shakespeare, from Othello’s recollections of wooing Desdemona. (“Passing” here means “very very”.) Rock troubadour Stew landed on the phrase for the title of an autobiography because it pressed a couple buttons: that of being a Black man profoundly out of his element—in Stew’s case, meaning a burgeoning liberal in Reaganite southern California—and also that even a titan like Othello could fret about picking up chicks.
Once Stew—or, more accurately, his youthful stage counterpart (Michael Jones)—flees that desperate scene, having been road-to-Damascus’d by a church guitar, fuzzy bildungsroman ensues. That is, fuzz from both the amps and the Amsterdam goods. (Berlin follows.)
Transformed into a hip yet welcoming nightclub (sets by Sydney Lynne; lights by David Goodman-Edberg; performances calibrated by director Tim Rhoze and music director Dr. Michael McBride), Theo’s Passing Strange will take you across all seven seas and back again. Don’t pass it up.
Passing Strange runs through July 30th at Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre, 721 Howard St., Evanston. For tickets or more information, please call (773) 939-4101 or visit theo-u.com.
For more reviews on these or other shows, please visit theatreinchicago.com.