DON’T COME TO THE CABARET
It’s the first time I have ever seen someone on stage in flop sweat. Poor Anastasia Barnes had a rough go in her opening of The Ruby Besler Cabaret. One would suppose a lack of air conditioning was the culprit, but the other five women on stage were dry as the Sahara. No, this was a sudden heavy perspiration that comes when you know your show is sliding off the rails.
Ms. Barnes may dry off for subsequent performances, but the issue here is not technical mishaps and under-rehearsed dancers. Even before earrings crumbled to bits and Barnes lost her place (“Where am I, Darlings?”), it was tough to take this act seriously. Is this an oversexed 1940s cabaret “star” reliving her daring exploits at the tail end of a golden career, or is Ms. Barnes doing a spoof of some dame who couldn’t really sing or act, but got ahead in show business because she followed her mother’s advice to always clean her beaver? Ruby (or, I suspect, Ms. Barnes) isn’t a great singer, and her original novelty offerings are netherworld pastiches which try desperately to be ditties of the Weimar era and WWII swing, but end up as incomplete songs that are mostly vamp with no substance (only one song – “Give it a Whirl” – is credited, written by Dow Brain and Barnes).
The character of Ruby Besler has already been tried on nine well-produced but supremely unfunny webisodes (check them out if you don’t believe me at www.The RubyBeslerShow.com). Her character is some kind of naughty Ann Landers from the 40s. While her gossip columnist demeanor in the online The Ruby Besler Show is decidedly more successful than in the live Cabaret at the Asylum Theatre, the writing by Barnes is just as flat. In The Ruby Besler Cabaret, Ruby disposes advice-drenched reminiscences from named chapters of her life which are displayed on cheap cardboard on an easel stage right. Her exploits go from secretarial school to a heartbreaking romance to stardom on Broadway, but never once do we buy “the perfection in fashion, face and figure of the archetypal 1940s Dame” as a star. On top of her monotonous delivery, Ruby impersonates others in her life – her boyfriend, her dad – but Barnes does not attempt to inhabit those characters. Her mom, for example, is merely Ruby stumbling and pretending to hold a cigarette. Plus, her attempts at coy and kittenish seduction come across like Melanie Griffith on Tylenol P.M.
The incongruity of her character – the mouth of a wisecracking moll wrapped in a breathy-voiced hostess – is matched by her ill-fitting 1940s gold lamé playsuit and long overskirt, combined with a platinum blonde Star Wars hairdo. Following that inconsistency are the, shall we say, “full-figured” dancers, who wear tuxedo bustiers and flutter feathered fans – while sporting anachronistic arm tattoos! The piano player Dorothy Diamond (Gere Fennelly) has long, stringy, dyed-black hair and is wearing a tight-fitting, sparkling silver, one-piece bathing suit thing, a bridal pearl necklace, another arm tattoo, and a small, white gentleman’s top hat from a 1970s wedding. Where are we? Costume designer Audrey Elliot Zoschke was clearly given carte blanche by director Doug Oliphant, but she couldn’t decide among a stripper in a 1920s Kansas City Burlesque house, a Frontierland saloon girl, or a Goth – so she settled for all three and created what can only be described as a white trash costume party in Victorville.
Oliphant’s blocking is no more than unmotivated pacing, and Flame Cynders’ choreography is better-suited for my mom’s aerobics class at Del Webb’s Sun City than for chorines backing up a big time celebrity, although I did enjoy the fan dancing (her busty dancers, “The Rubies,” are Tatiana Giannoutsos, Regan Carrington, Laurel Vecsey, and Cynders, all from the Fishnet Follies Classic Burlesque Revue). As Barnes attempted to get the curtain call right by whispering directions to her co-actors, I wondered for a fleeting second whether there was some kind of joke going on, but I just wasn’t in on it. But when an audience member tripped over a cigarette tray prop that Barnes had left in the house, I just remembered that this was, after all, the Hollywood Fringe Festival.
photos by Ed Krieger
The Ruby Besler Cabaret
Theatre Asylum
part of the Hollywood Fringe Festival
scheduled to end on July 29, 2013
for tickets and schedule, visit http://www.hollywoodfringe.org/
