Courtesy of Off the Wall
The Off The Wall Theatre has what is likely to be a commercial success on its hands with its campy stage adaptation of Valley of the Dolls. A silly comic staging of a belovedly awful film, Dale Gutzman’s adaptation is not without its charm. A story of women careening through fast lane show business lifestyles in the 1960s is brought vividly to life with a quartet of drag queens. The set-up alone has a great deal of appeal. It’s not surprising then that much of the show’s run was sold out before the show even had it s first performance.
With everything in place, this show is probably one of the easiest programming decisions to make. the premise alone is a guaranteed hit. It’s as sake a decision for Off the Wall as it is for The Rep to stage another A Christmas Carol at the Pabst. The savviness of the production lies almost entirely in its conception. Any other virtues the production may have beyond that are just details.
That above paragraph pretty much summed-up my overall feeling on the show when I was writing the review, but there are a couple of things that still impress me about Gutzman’s adaptation a couple of days after leaving the intimate space of the Off The Wall.
First off--it really is very, very difficult to stage a comic spoof of a classic piece of inadvertently bad cinema. Any production has a very difficult balance to strike between loving the movie for what it is and loving the movie for what it was probably trying to be. With this adaptation, Gutzman and company have struck a really nice balance between genuine emotion and open and aggressively bad comedy. I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for the comedy when I saw it, so I didn’t particularly like it. The balance between it and the serious heart of the story sticks with me though. It’s kind of haunting.
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The other thing that still kind of haunts me about the production is the fact that it manages to create a pleasantly disorienting alternate reality. It’s probably one of the most basic aspects of theatre: make people believe in a world that’s being imagined onstage. All of the main female roles here are played by drag queens who look like drag queens. All the characters they are playing are very desirable women. Everyone is treating them like very desirable women. They are the mega-stars of a decade long-gone. Gutzman’s Valley of the Dolls is set in a strangely convincing 1960s America where the most desirable and glamorous women in the world were men dressed as women. It’s not anything that necessarily appeals to me personally in any kind of a deeply satisfying way, but it is such a pleasantly strange place to visit. So I guess I didn’t necessarily enjoy it, but I did have a good time. This is precisely the sort of thing that can happen when you set out to, as near as I can make out, adapt a movie that’s so bad that it’s good into a live stage production that is good by virtue of how bad it is. Or something like that.
Off The Wall Theatre’s production of Valley of the Dolls runs through Jan. 11 on 127 E. Wells St. For ticket reservations, call 414-484-8874. A somewhat less convoluted and far more concise review of the show runs in the next issue of the Shepherd-Express.
