Thursday , March 28 2024
A campy musical about death – what could go wrong? Alas, quite a bit.

Theater Review (NYC): Chris Tanner’s ‘The Etiquette of Death’ at La Mama

A campy musical about death – what could go wrong?

Chris Tanner’s The Etiquette of Death stars Mr. Tanner as an battleaxe of a beauty entrepreneur smartly named Joan Girdler, along with a fine Brandon Olson as her fatally ill son Joey and none other than Everett Quinton himself as a vainglorious Death. Steven Hammel’s sparkling set hosts athletic staging, energetic production numbers, dramatic deaths, and a lot more; marking the close of LaMama’s historic 50th season, the show has many problems, but lack of ambition is not one of them.

Chris Tanner as Joan Girdler (standing) and Everett Quinton as Death (sitting) in the World Premiere of The Etiquette of Death. Photo by Ves Pitts.
Chris Tanner as Joan Girdler (standing) and Everett Quinton as Death (sitting) in the World Premiere of The Etiquette of Death. Photo by Ves Pitts.

Probably the most fundamental fault is too-many-cooks syndrome. To put together this meditation on death Mr. Tanner solicited contributions from a whole raft of writers and has ended up with a production that’s half narrative and half collage, two strands which, not surprisingly, never cohere. The program credits no fewer than four people with dramaturgy; that in itself should tell you something.

If the show stuck with the variety-show format suggested by its opening scenes, it might have had a chance (though the weak material around the first “guest” wouldn’t in itself be promising). Instead, the dominant story – of Joey’s slow decline and death while Joan dithers and attempts to circumvent her own doom – lurches onward in spasms of awkward storytelling and mostly ineffective humor. Some sharply conceived songs and song fragments focus the energy but only for moments; Julie Atlas Muz choreographs the flouncy but often inexplicable production numbers with intermittent humor and sensitivity but in a lost cause.

Imagine one of John Waters’s early wacko pictures minus the bullheaded imaginative focus of one bent genius; imagine a production of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company without the guiding hand; imagine The Rocky Horror Picture Show with better songs and (in some cases) better acting, but no narrative flow to give them a pulse. There were some amplification problems at the performance I saw, but where such things usually annoy and distract, here they hardly even bothered me, seeming simply part of the overall chaos.

It doesn’t help that the singing ranges from very good to pretty bad, or that the best scene, a long, sharp-witted, and funny one featuring one woman drawling boredly on about death while her companion simply eats and nods, centers on characters who have nothing to do with the main story.

It’s not the first time I’ve seen a show that engages LaMama’s reputation for experimentation and falls on its face, and I expect it won’t be the last. But two things I’ll give The Etiquette of Death: it didn’t anger me the way bad theater on a large scale usually does, since the camp and the drag and the earnestly over-the-top musical numbers kept me watching; nor did it bore me, instead keeping me hanging on the big question of whether the next scene would be ill-conceived or ill-played.

There are nuggets of possibility here, in some of the songs and a few of the conceits, but what’s on stage now feels like a very preliminary first draft in which the extraneous flights of fancy have been left indiscriminately intact while worthy elements have been left unidentified and unshaped.

The Etiquette of Death runs through July 1 at La Mama.

Photo: Chris Tanner as Joan Girdler (standing) and Everett Quinton as Death (sitting) in the World Premiere of The Etiquette of Death. Photo by Ves Pitts.

About Jon Sobel

Jon Sobel is Publisher and Executive Editor of Blogcritics as well as lead editor of the Culture & Society section. As a writer he contributes most often to Music, where he covers classical music (old and new) and other genres, and Culture, where he reviews NYC theater. Through Oren Hope Marketing and Copywriting at http://www.orenhope.com/ you can hire him to write or edit whatever marketing or journalistic materials your heart desires. Jon also writes the blog Park Odyssey at http://parkodyssey.blogspot.com/ where he is on a mission to visit every park in New York City. He has also been a part-time working musician, including as lead singer, songwriter, and bass player for Whisperado.

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