Theatre Group has been teasing Claudia Shear’s Mae West bioplay “Dirty Blonde,” since announcing a fated run in 2002 that was to star Alex Ryer, Chris Whyde and Scott McLean. If there were a letter before A, that’s what list those three would be on.
Back then, “Dirty Blonde” was the second-hottest play in America, with only “Proof” getting more stagings. But year after year, TG kept promising, then yanking, “Blonde” from its slate.
Why it has taken five years to bring West’s story to the TG’s stage is a drama in itself. But here it finally is, and despite the yeoman effort of a likable if overmatched cast, one can’t help but wonder what might have been.
Ryer specializes in playing larger-than-life women like Edith Piaf and Peggy Lee. She’s got the curve and the nerve to capably ape West, the quotable Brooklyn bombshell who turned Hollywood upside down with her bawdy, vaudevillian sexual forwardness. (“It’s not the man in your life that counts – it’s the life in your man.”)
Now, into West’s stilettos walks Kristine Pound, a lovely actress with a fine body of work. I like what she does with West, but she’s just not a jaw-dropping, buxom sex goddess. So when she admonishes men to look at her “up here,” the joke falls flat. When she smiles, she’s a ringer – not for West but Pat Schroeder (seriously, it’s uncanny). There’s not enough sex in her suggestiveness, not enough danger in her delivery. She’s actually kind of sweetly shy.
Supporting actors Michael Emmitt and David Ballew make for a perfectly nice trio. And that’s fatal to Steven Tangedal’s production. It’s nice when it should be naughty; it’s reverential when it should be raunchy; it’s sweet when it should be scorching. In short, it lacks attitude.The blood’s not pumping.
But as bioplays go, “Dirty Blonde” is one of the better-written ones. It tells parallel stories – West’s fascinating rise to stardom and scandal, including her 1926 obscenity arrest; her discovery of Cary Grant; her use of the double-entendre to get past censors. That plays out alongside a touching, contemporary affair between a fanboy and an actress equally obsessed with the legend.
In both tales, Emmitt plays Charlie, first as a bashful kid who strikes an unlikely friendship with the lonely, aging starlet. They relive the saucy years before West sank into a lonely parody of herself. It’s an enormous arc for any actor to navigate.
Years later, visiting West’s grave, Charlie meets brassy Jo, and their significant bond grows surprisingly complex and moving as Charlie embarks on his own journey of self-discovery. Ballew plays all the other men in West’s life as the story hurtles smartly back and forward in time.
Tangedal heightens the noir and the vérité effects by opening with a West film playing over closed red curtains, as if to obscure physical comparisons between West and the actor about to take the stage. When Pound starts to deliver West’s famous one-liners (“When I’m good, I’m very good; but when I’m bad, I’m better”), she does not incite the polite crowd as the real thing might – which the director acknowledges by piping in boisterous huzzahs.
The problem here isn’t unlike the 99 percent of bioplays that fall short because an actor can’t live up to the legend. How could anyone? That’s why she’s a legend.
The play’s enduring line empahsizes that point by equating West with Venice: “There is no place else in the world that you can say, ‘it’s like Venice.”‘
“Dirty Blonde”
BIOPLAY|Theatre Group|Written by Claudia Shear|Directed by Steven Tangedal|Starring Kristine Pound, Michael Emmitt and David Ballew|THROUGH MARCH 10|At Theatre on Broadway, 13 S. Broadway|7:30 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays (plus March 1)|1 hour, 55 minutes with no intermission|$15|303-777-3292 (theatregroup.org)
