Love Is Dead
(The Annoyance)
I Saw You
(Bruised Orange Theater Company)
Briefly, some words on two shows that make light of the sometimes dark and desperate urges of the human heart. And crotch.
1.
Love Is Dead is the latest musical comedy from The Annoyance, the theater that gave us other such memorable musicals as Your Butt, That Darned Antichrist, and the long-running Coed Prison Sluts (musical numbers from these and other Annoyance shows are currently performed in the theater's Saturday night offering, Happy Song Fun Time).
Like those earlier shows, Love Is Dead has a premise that mixes the silly, the demented, and the raunchy: in a small town in Vermont, a mild-mannered mortician named Orin fools around with the singing, dancing, canoodling corpses of the victims of a serial killer stalking the town. Romance with a living, breathing woman--hitherto an impossibility for our socially-inept hero--arrives in the person of one Julie, who suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder and harbors a secret of her own. This secret, jealous corpses, and DNA evidence pointing to Orin as the killer are among the dangers threatening to overthrow the couple's happiness.
The material doesn't quite have the bite or sloppy, rambunctious glee of, say, Coed Prison Sluts. But the tunes by Julie Nichols are catchy, James Asmus' book and lyrics are smart and funny, and the acting is skillful and sure. If you can find a more enjoyable musical about fucking corpses, I'd like to see it.
2.
From invented weirdos to real ones. Performed in bars across the city, I Saw You features staged readings of actual personal ads from the Chicago Reader. Some of the ads are from those seeking romance, some are from those seeking sex, and some are from those seeking the handsome stranger on the train with whom they kept making eye contact but couldn't screw up the courage to talk to. Well-selected and inventively performed, the ads lay bare the fevered, painfully funny longings of the desperate, the horny, and the desperately horny. Irresistible.
ELSEWHERE:
My salute to Monday night at Sidetrack and my short review of Some Girl(s) (produced by Profiles Theatre) are in the current issue of the Chicago Reader.
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