The Wild Party is a triumph of inspired acting, direction and design, a pageant so stunningly professional that it may mark an epoch in the history of Tampa Bay area theater. At St. Petersburg's Theatre@620, the brand new freeFall Theatre Company brings us the Roaring Twenties at their most anarchic, a steaming cauldron in which sex and race, bathtub gin and cocaine merge into a potion of near overwhelming power. Director Eric Davis has assembled a superbly talented cast that sings Michael John LaChiusa's potently jazzy anthems with Broadway assurance, and acts the script by LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe as if their hedonistic, thrill-seeking lives depended on it. In 10 years of reviewing theater for Creative Loafing, I can't remember another show that was both so visceral and so polished. If this is any indication of what freeFall has in store for us, then the bar for Bay area theater has just hit the clouds.
The first thing you notice when you enter the Studio is that the space has been altered to accommodate several sitting areas, as if three or four living rooms (and a dining room and a bedroom) could all coexist in one comfortable 1920s superloft. It's in these areas that the audience sits — and in and around them that the characters perform. Those characters storm on to the set — and into our lives — with impudent energy, compelled by sex and aggression and a palpably bittersweet joie de vivre.
There's Queenie, the vaudeville dancer, who's "sexually ambitious" and living with Burrs, the entertainer who loves her — and who's always just a few steps away from violence. Then there are the guests at the party: Madelaine and her girlfriend Sally; cocaine-snorting bisexual lothario Jackie; Mae and her lover, the boxer Eddie; and Mae's little sister Nadine, who at 14 years old just can't wait to get initiated into some big-city debauchery. There's older-but-not-wiser Dolores, who'll do anything and anybody if it puts her back in the limelight, and the partners Gold and Goldberg, vaudeville producers who are about to move uptown to Broadway, if they can only remember where they lost their pants.
There are the Armano Brothers, Phil and Oscar, who sing together and sleep together, and there's Kate, Queenie's best friend and competitor for the title of top slut, who comes to the party with Black, a man whom no woman can resist — especially not Queenie — when he puts on his "mooch." Put it all together — and add delightfully jazzy music, super-intense performances, the look of anarchy and the feel of perfectly calibrated order — and you have a spectacle that grabs you from the first moment and never stops.
These are characters that believe in nothing but pleasure, and who therefore live threatened by the devastating possibility that their pleasure will be stolen by one another, by age, by one more narcotic, or by pure chance. And when Black starts hitting on Queenie — who loves every moment of it — there's also the possibility of despair turning into bloodshed. "She's everybody's cherry pie/ But you don't get a slice," sings Burrs. But Black isn't listening, and in the end, someone will have to pay.
The acting and singing in the play are universally splendid, but a few performances stand out even in this talented crowd. David Foley Jr. as Burrs is a manic physical presence whose control of events is perilously shaky; and James Martin Roberts as Burrs' rival Black is a soft-spoken Don Juan who has not the slightest doubt that he deserves whatever he desires (the interracial liaisons in the musical are just another feature of its modernity).
Lee Anne Mathews is Queenie, the vaudeville tart, who lost her soul, apparently, at puberty and who now is only a body seeking other bodies; and Jonathan Hack as Jackie is the smoothest, most elegant rake in a world of tarts and rakes. But I can't stop with these — I also have to mention Nicole Kaplan's star-struck Nadine and John Lombardi's hilarious Goldberg. Director Davis' costuming, from Queenie's underthings to Goldberg's suit, is as superlative as everything else, and the paintings on the wall — of sultry women with Queenie's DNA — constitute one more fine touch out of many. As for the portrait of Buddha, well, let's guess it's there for irony.
In sum: See this show. It's astonishingly good, unlike anything else the Bay area has witnessed in a decade. And welcome to freeFall. If future productions are all on the level of this one, Tampa Bay area theater has just evolved to a new height.
Fire Alarm. Gorilla Theatre in the Drew Park area of Tampa has been closed down by the Fire Marshal. According to Gorilla managing director Bridget Bean, "The Fire Marshal has told us that until we get some building work done, we cannot have public performances. We've known about this for some time, but we were unable to get building permits for the work, for various reasons."
Fire Marshal has required the theater to put in a firewall and an additional exit. Says Bean, "Now we're getting things moving, our landlord is helping, and we're getting the paperwork done and so on." Because of the closing, the last weekend of An Oak Tree was moved to the HCC Theatre in Ybor City, where it still attracted crowds of 70-80. As to when the Hubert Avenue Gorilla site will reopen, Bean thinks "it's possible it might be open for Mad Forest [starts Oct. 23]. … but we'll certainly be open for our Christmas show. … Six Degrees of Separation" [starts December 4]. Please hurry, Gorilla; odd as it is, we've grown accustomed to your space.
This article appears in Sep 24-30, 2008.