Complicating the set up is
the theater’s Jewish cleaning lady, Lily (Mallory Portnoy)
recently arrived from the Ukraine. She develops a crush on Tess
just about the time that Danny develops a crush on Al.
Then there’s Phillip "Pip" Gibson (Larray Grimes), the African
American dancer. Lily boards with Phillip’s mother and they have
become close friends, to the disgust of Lily’s estranged husband
Jake (Dan McVey, who also does a turn as Mr. G, the film’s
director), who’s not only taken on the American name of Dutch,
but the American disease of racism.
He’s sure his estranged
wife and Pip are having an affair, and he’s been in the U.S.
long enough to know that’s a chaloshes. He’s even taken up
with some Irish thugs, also played by Wood and Nicholson, to
rough Phillip up and send Lily a message or two. What the
film crew does to throw Dutch and his goons off the trail makes
up the delightful second act, which is all singing and dancing,
and a screening of the little Biograph film that everyone’s been
working on in Act One.
The show is full of lovely
performances. Burkarth is great as the ham actor who’s been
reduced to making movies -- you may at first think him a creep
till he learns better, and the other cast members perform with a
good-hearted verve. The only villain is McVey’s rat-like Jake,
but the play is so charitable that even he gets off easy. In
Kahn’s vision Fourteenth street at the turn of the last century
was simply the place for everyone -- male, female, gay,
straight, ethnic minority -- and if you were like Jake and
didn’t wish to join the party, it was entirely your loss. Kahn’s
direction is spirited -- the over-the-top acting she has the
cast do during Act One is both hilarious and exactly in the
style of those old silents.
The period costumes by
Alice J. Garland are gorgeous; check out the feathered and
beribboned hat Vera wears as she steps out with her husband.
Set designer Mark Marcante
takes advantage of the warehouse like space to create the sort
of comfortably messy set that was probably the norm for silent
movie sets and old time theaters, and Richard Reta’s lighting
design complements it nicely. Of course, in between scenes we’re
treated to music by Scott Joplin and other ragtime
musical by Barbara Kahn, is and is not old fashioned -- its
centerpiece features two gay romances, something an impresario
probably wouldn’t have presented at the Olympic Theatre one
hundred years ago. But its themes of friendship, love, inclusion
and the joys of the theater are timeless.