REVIEW: It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad Lemoine world!
Skirts On Fire takes Stewart Lemoine’s usual volatile collection of eccentrics and cheery misfits, vigorously shakes them together and sets them to fizzing like an exotic cocktail.
If you’re looking for an existential probe of humanity’s existence you’re searching the wrong planet. A remount playing at the Varscona Theatre through October 13, Lemoine’s 1950s New York screwball world is peopled with good natured characters – a wisecrack on their lips and out for an adventure – the more bizarre the better.
Like Porter Lawrence (Ron Pederson), a grade school literature teacher who finds himself at the Sweet ‘n Low Diner because someone has written him for help. (The joint is called the Sweet ‘n Low because there are no chairs – only cushions to sit on. When you ask for a menu Shirley, the sassy waitress (Louise Lambert), snaps, “There’s no menu. Just tell me what you want!” The perpetrator of the message for help turns out to be a cantankerous J.D. Salinger-type who has written one famous short story and then disappeared. As we soon learn, the writer is really the invention of Hartwood Keane (Andrew MacDonald-Smith), a charming young scam artist-around-town. Keane wants Porter to impersonate the recluse so he can get a big advance from the woman he is currently romancing, Evangeline Gold (Andrea House). She’s the trend-dictating Anna Wintour-type editor of The Feminine Home Digest, whose stories include “Next year is the year of the zircon” and “Cuba. Who needs it?”
When informed that Keane is flimflamming her she observes, “Fine! But his clothes hang well. Let’s see where it goes.”
We meet her no-nonsense secretary, Thetis Kipp (Kendra Connor) with a mouth like a shrivelled prune and the carriage of a battleship. Thetis is given to opening greetings like, “Do I know you? Do I have to talk to you?” and then stalking out of the room.
Added to this motley group is Claudia Birch (Paula Humby), a young reporter, who, sensing a story, goes through a series of outlandish disguises and accents to keep on top of what’s happening. My favourite: a bang on impression of Katherine Hepburn complete with the mosquito netting from On Golden Pond.
Skirts On Fire is a rollicking evening of almost continuous laughter. The affable performers sail through the production with good spirits, the evident conviction that the events transpiring make perfect sense and their actions are the only way to behave in such company. Writer-director Lemoine sets the energy level on high and the pace at breakneck. Even the set changes are comically choreographed to the pounding rhythms of that ol’ blues shouter, Louis Prima.
The evening ends with an oh-so-sophisticated party in Claudia’s tiny apartment in the Marmoset Hotel for Working Women. The Champagne flows, the hors d’oeuvres and the dialogue are spicy and, of course, Miss Kipp emerges as a looker with a va-va-voom bosom that elicits a double take from all who meet her.
The performers develop a real bond both with each other and their willing audience, and with words and situations like these, Lemoine has given them all the right tools.
Photos by Mat Busby
