Outrageousness was Bowery’s specialty, as it was George’s (real name O’Dowd), and the show suffers from bifurcation into discrete, but not all that different, protagonists. That Boy George is played by Euan Morton (believably), and Leigh Bowery by Boy George (unbelievably), adds confusion. Moreover, an equally outré pal of theirs, Philip Sallon, is played so dazzlingly by Raúl Esparza as to steal scenes from both of them, further blurring the focus. Two women also score: Liz McCartney as Big Sue, Leigh’s portly, unflappable chum, and Sarah Uriarte Berry, as Nicola, Leigh’s small, improbably devoted wife.
A major minus is that George O’Dowd, prematurely aged at 42, is overstuffed and unprepossessing, and, though still able to sing, unable to act. As a rival transvestite, Marilyn, and George’s off-and-on lover, Marcus, Jeffrey Carlson and Cary Shields are passable. Properly creepy is the chorus of misfits in costumes barely less freakish than the principals’; no wonder it took two designers to dream them up. Less explicable are the two “music co-writers” for Boy George; for this music, one writer should have been enough. Tim Goodchild’s set is aptly tawdry; Natasha Katz’s lighting suitably glitzy. Christopher Renshaw’s direction is proficient; only, as in most recent musicals, the choreography (by Mark Dendy) is pedestrian.
The book sporadically manages to be amusingly catty, but never, try as it may, moving. Now if you stand in the right place on 45th Street, you’ll have on your right The Boy From Oz, a musical about a gay Aussie, on your left Taboo, a musical partly about a gay Aussie, neither a winner. But only Taboo will steep you in a Hamletic quandary: Ta boo or not ta boo, that is the question.
The Pulitzer Prize–winning play Anna in the Tropics is a marked improvement over the Cuban-American Nilo Cruz’s previous efforts, although that is not saying very much. It is about Cuban transplants to Florida running or working in a Tampa cigar factory in 1929. Such workers had a lector reading aloud to them from a usually romantic novel, making their tasks less tedious. In this factory, the dashing new lector is reading Anna Karenina, excerpts from which constitute an appreciable part of the play. Whatever can be said about Cruz as a playwright, he does know how to pick a collaborator.
Santiago, the factory owner, is a likable but compulsive gambler; his wife, Ofelia, is a charming, plucky woman of good sense. Conchita, their elder daughter, is married to the prosaic Palomo, who cheats on her; the younger daughter, Marela, is an excitable, unabashed dreamer. The new lector, Juan Julian, a heartthrob, is beloved of all women, especially Conchita, who becomes a cheater for him. Real trouble comes from the hard-nosed Cheché, illegitimate son of Santiago’s father by a Yankee woman, who covets more shares in the factory, wants to introduce machines, and hates lectors, because the last one ran off with his wife.
The situation is fraught and sweaty, although Tampa isn’t quite in the tropics, and the production is short on even subtropical heat. Cruz’s pseudo-poetic language (e.g., Ofelia’s “Men marry their cigars . . . and the white smoke becomes the veil of their brides”) taxes our patience, especially in the somewhat exaggerated Hispanic accents that clash with the overliterary English.
Emily Mann’s direction is merely carne y patatas, and the performances are uneven. Jimmy Smits does well by the lector, and Priscilla Lopez is an endearing Ofelia. But the gushy Marela of Vanessa Aspillaga is way over-the-top, and the listless, gray-voiced Conchita of Daphne Rubin-Vega is too near the bottom. John Ortiz gets the befuddled Palomo right; Victor Argo (Santiago) and David Zayas (Cheché) suffice.
A famous alleged schoolboy boner runs, “A pullet surprise is given in America every year for the best writings.” Anna has no more claim to poultry than to poetry, but the ending offers a putative bullet surprise, which, heavily foreshadowed, proves unsurprising, as does the affirmative- action Pulitzer bestowed on the play.
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