Previously books and movie reivews, this week Broadway.
It’s been a little while since my partner and I went to a show, last spring actually, to see the silly, contagious ode to 80’s headbanging Rock of Ages. Charles Busch’s The Divine Sister is equally tongue-in-cheek in tone but a lot more clever and satisfying.
Busch has a cult following. His theater and film projects haven’t made it to the marquee’s of Times Square or the strip mall multiplexes (with the exception of his Tale of the Allergist’s Wife). But his admirers will follow him wherever he goes from Off Broadway to the community theaters across the country.
He works in the medium of 50’s/60’s screen diva reincarnation: Die, Mommy, Die! (Bette Davis), Psycho Beach Party (Joan Crawford), which perhaps has a limited audience, but for those of us who could imagine few pleasures greater than snuggling in for the night to watch All About Eve, he delivers big time. There’s absurdity galore, and emoting doesn’t begin to describe Busch’s stage performance, but I wouldn’t classify his portrayals as send-up or parody. As ridiculous and vulgar as things can get—his sexually voracious Angela Arden in Die, Mommy, Die comes to mind—he manages to walk that difficult line between caricature and misogyny. He is, after all, a gay man in make-up and a dress who loves the campy female characters he recreates. The send-up is in the subversion of the sunnied, homogenized family-friendliness of 50’s and 60’s screen hits.
In The Divine Sister, Busch plays Mother Superior at St. Veronica’s, a convent on the skids. The buildings are falling apart, there’s no money to rebuild the community, a visiting German nun is up to something nefarious late at night, and young Sister Agnes–a derivation from the movie Agnes of God–is having miraculous, and likely, fictitious visions that have attracted the interest of a Hollywood screenwriter.
It’s hard for Busch to stand out amidst the phenomenal comic cast. Julie Halston is the hard edged Sister Acacius who is steadily unraveling from a guilty conscience. Alison Fraser channels Marlene Dietrich cum Frau Blucher as Sister Walburga, and Jennifer Van Dyck is a snooty heiress prone to lapse into absurd, meandering reminiscences. Busch’s deference to his co-stars is a triumph. Everyone has their “moment,” and you find yourself rooting for everyone no matter what their bizarre motives.
Best of all is how the actors play off each other with perfect comic timing. A string of double entendre insults delivered to Sister Acacius (too dirty to repeat here) was a highlight. Good for full-body laughter.
