Uptown Players | Dallas, Texas


		Written by: Charles Busch

Red Scare On Sunset
Date: April 23 – May 16, 2004 Directed by - Andi Allen Set Design - Andi Allen Lighting Design - Julie Simmons Costume Design - Suzi Shankle and Bill Bullard Sound Design - Virgil Justice

Cast : Coy Covington, Nye Cooper, John de los Santos, Brian Gonzales**, Steve Lovett, Jim Lindsay, Lisa Anne Haram and Renee Krapff

** Member of Actors Equity Association

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Photographs by Mark Oristano

Review/Awards

Uptown Players' finery outfits Hollywood satire at every two-faced level

By LAWSON TAITTE / The Dallas Morning News

There's bad bad acting and there's good bad acting. Uptown Players' Red Scare on Sunset has far more of the good sort.

Charles Busch's farce, which opened at the Trinity River Arts Center on Friday, dares to be political – awkwardly, at first. The early jibes at McCarthy-era red baiting seem simplistic, but the playwright quickly turns his attack guns on the Communists as well. Both right and left, this plays says, are all too quick to quash freedom.

Especially sexual freedom, of course, in this show tailored to a gay audience with Givenchy elegance. Mr. Busch raises high camp to the stratospheric, with his leading role, movie star Mary Dale, played by a cross-dressing man (Coy Covington) and doubles entendres in almost every line.

Mary's husband, Frank Taggart (Nye Cooper), tries to pull his career out of a tailspin by signing up for method acting classes. He soon discovers, though, that the acting school is a front for the Communist Party. Mary's best friend, radio comedienne Pat Pilford (Lisa Anne Haram), is being blackmailed by her Red former lover, Pulitzer- winning playwright Mitchell Drake (Brian Gonzales), to force her to become a Party tool.

Andi Allen has directed the show in a very broad style, sometimes too ridiculous even for such a play from the Theater of the Ridiculous school. The approach does pay off in a lot of laughs, especially at the show's melodramatic climax, when murder and suicide keep 'em rolling in the aisles.

Mr. Gonzalez actually manages to underplay hilariously in the midst of all this extravagantly fake emoting. The others get their laughs from sheer excess. Mr. Cooper does this most consistently. Every melodramatic downcast look comes off brilliantly. Ms. Haram starts out weak but relaxes into her overacting as the evening goes on.

Mr. Covington epitomizes the show's strengths and its limitations. The playwright makes Mary the symbol for all that was bright and glamorous – and shallow – in the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Mr. Covington looks as demure and as fresh-faced as Doris Day as he towers over the other actors in his high heels. The actor's fans clearly dote on him, but he'd be even better if he didn't toss off his lines so quickly and attempted just a smidgeon of sincerity.

The sets tend toward tackiness – not a bad choice for the genre. The costumes by Suzie Shankle and Bill Bullard are just right. And Steven-Shayle Rhodes' wigs are so fine you wish some other companies around town would take a hint.

Arnold Wayne Jones - Dallas Voice
Count down of the best theatre of 2004

# 1. Red Scare on Sunset (Uptown Players)
In the past few years, Charles Busch has not been merely in evidence, he's been inevitable. The best local production of one of this plays, "Red Scare on Sunset" was the year's most deliciously funny romp, and one not nearly as inane as the title suggests. Coy Covington, who played 1950s-era starlet Mary Dale, stole the show, but the entire cast was excellent. ..

Uptown Players take a comic romp through Hollywood's commie-fearing '50s
Elaine Liner- Dallas Observer

"It's a maaaaaarvelous script," says radiant screen queen Mary Dale of her role as Lady Godiva in a big-budget bio-pic set in the 11th century. "Really illuminates those troubled times. And we have some terrific musical numbers." Dale, sleeker than Lana Turner, sweeter than Doris Day, is playwright Charles Busch's symbol of old Hollywood in his comedy Red Scare on Sunset, currently onstage with the Uptown Players at the Trinity River Arts Center.

That Mary is played by a man, in this case the expert gender-bending actor Coy Covington, is just one of the twists that makes Busch's sharp social satire such fun. Hitting hard at the homophobia and hypocritical whispering campaigns that ruined the lives and careers of many Hollywood pros during Senator Joe McCarthy's Communist witch hunts, the play also takes aim at that other threat to the American movie biz: method acting.

Mary Dale is anything but a method actress. Her on-camera method (as was Spencer Tracy's) is simply "Learn your lines and don't bump into the furniture" (a line uttered by Covington with impeccable comic timing). Lip-synching her songs and finding her most flattering angle are far more crucial skills to Mary than artsy acting exercises in sense memory and subtext.

To Mary, life is just a bowl of Technicolor cherries. Until, that is, her alcoholic actor-husband, Frank Taggart (Nye Cooper), a character not unlike shaky Norman Maine in A Star Is Born, gets mixed up with a mess of Brando-esque method types. Lured to a Stanislavski class by a scowling vamp named Marta (Renee Krapff), Frank is blackmailed into signing up for extended study. What he doesn't realize is that the acting school is a front for a Communist Party cell trying to take over Tinseltown with such revolutionary, neorealist ideas as eliminating the star system and--gasp!--photographing aging divas without lens filters.

Leading Hollywood's efforts to bait the reds is Pat Pilford (Lisa Ann Haram), a frowzy "femcee" of a celebrity-studded radio hour. Pat and Mary are best pals, with Pat serving as Mary's touchstone on such topics as politics and homosexuality. During a broadcast diatribe about the "sanctity of the American family," Pat shrieks that "people are sodomizing each other at the drop of a hat!" (a line that elicits roars of laughter from the gay-friendly crowd at this theater). Like a Kaye Ballard-sized Anita Bryant, Pat preaches that "Ideas are dangerous. Squash them!" She also warns clueless Mary about Marta's designs on Frank. "She's had more Russians in her than the Kremlin," Pat snarls.

Like Shanghai Moon, Charles Busch's hilarious take on 1930s opium-and-spies mysteries that recently had a good run at the Pocket Sandwich Theatre, Red Scare on Sunset employs the very clichés of the genre it sends up. Early in the play, Frank and Marta meet for a clandestine tryst on a pier, a scene calling up any of a dozen propaganda-filled film noirs Hollywood churned out in the '50s to pacify the right. (Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street, starring Richard Widmark, Jean Peters and Thelma Ritter, was the best of those, and it's just out on DVD.)

In an extended dream sequence in the second act, Mary becomes heroic Lady Godiva, leading a charge down Sunset Boulevard to cleanse the town of pinkos and perverts. When she wakes from her pill-induced haze, Mary marches off to Washington, D.C., where she blithely names every name she can think of in a HUAC-y sequence in front of the Senate committee. Remember, there was a reason that little band of protesters back then was called the "Hollywood Ten." There were far more Mary Dales waving their flags and squawking to the Feds to save their own hides than there were actors and directors willing to stand up to the bullying and blacklists.

Busch, who draws inspiration from old Hollywood for almost all of his plays, manages to temper his biting political statements about jingoistic patriotism and shallow American values in Red Scare by maintaining a farcical tone that isn't just over the top, but over the top of the top of the top. The man-in-drag as the leading lady is just the half of it. There's also a screaming queen houseboy (John de los Santos), a producer (Steve Lovett) in a white suit only Sydney Greenstreet could love and a leering director (Jim Lindsay) in a beret and jodhpurs who turns out to be...well, that's a secret.

Some real film history is mixed in with the hysterics. Dishy references abound, with throwaways mentioning Helen Trauble (opera singer and frequent Fred Allen Show radio guest in the '40s), Don Loper (Hollywood dress designer featured in an I Love Lucy episode), Dore Schary (MGM studio chief in the '50s) and the Westmores (a dynasty of movie makeup artists).

The Uptown cast, directed by Andi Allen, throws itself into all of this with remarkable flair and oodles of energy. Coy Covington out-glams his last wig-and-wiggle performance in last year's Ruthless! by becoming part Donna Reed, part Susan Hayward as Mary Dale. Every glossy pose, every double-take, every curl of Mary's lip is perfection.

As husband Frank, Nye Cooper gets to show off his deft physical comedy skills. Drunkenly shaking off a trench coat, he's a little bit Don Knotts, a little Charlie Chaplin. Best known to Dallas theatergoers as "Crumpet the Elf" in WaterTower Theatre's annual production of the one-man comedy The Santaland Diaries, Cooper matches Covington evenly in the mugging department.

From the rest of the strong ensemble, Renee Krapff is a standout as Marta, using a voice redolent of old Hollywood's insistence on the "Mid-Atlantic" accent. And by not joining the other actors in a buffet of scenery chewing, Brian Gonzales gets big laughs by underplaying his role as a leftie playwright. He and Krapff do some great funny business with lit cigarettes.

Sets for Red Scare are intentionally tacky. But the costumes by Suzie Shankle and Bill Bullard have the '50s elegance of a Douglas Sirk film. That hostess coat. Those leopard gloves. The swooping feathers on Mary's new hat. Simply divine, dahling. Covington's wardrobe is particularly impressive. He even gets a fresh gown for his bows in front of the red velvet curtain. Yes, a red curtain. Maaaaaarvelous.

The Coy-munist Threat: Covington steals the show in the riotous campfest 'Red Scare on Sunset'

Arnold Wayne Jones - Dallas Voice

The secret to acting in a melocomedy like “Red Scare on Sunset” — and Charles Busch does not write melodramas; he writes melocomedies — is a little trick called “eyebrow acting.” It’s the way performers transmit the sad, tortured, potentially life-changing aspect of every plot point with their faces, usually without a hint of irony. It’s not solely facial expressions that can qualify as eyebrow acting. In the proper hands, no word should be spoken to sound natural or authentic, and no kiss should be sincerely felt but instead simply look wet and passionate. Think Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh silhouetted against the setting sun and you’ve got a rudimentary understanding of what Busch expects out of every line of dialogue.

Eyebrow acting is not bad acting, at least not necessarily. In fact, finding the perfect pitch — tightrope-walking the fine line between awful and delicious — may be the subtlest (and most daring) task you can expect of an actor. Thank goodness, then, actors who know the distinction populate the Uptown Players’ production of “Red Scare”. John de los Santos, Brian Gonzales, Lisa Anne Haram and Nye Cooper in particular all seethe and hiss and clench their jaws like they’ve just stepped on a rusty nail. They are marvelous. But the master of them all is Coy Covington.

Covington seems born to play over-the-top tragic heroines. It’s probably his earthy baritone that helps anchor the lines, making them seem weighty and significant even when they clearly are not. Speaking to a friend in the women’s wear section of a department store, he slowly intones, “After this, I thought we’d … look at slacks.” The faux tragedy, the breathless ridiculousness of it all, makes you laugh out loud. And that’s not the only time.

“Red Scare on Sunset” is one of Busch’s wickedly silly satires, a catalogue that also includes “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife” and “Die Mommie Die!” Busch’s playwriting gimmick, which he makes his own, is to seamlessly combine outdated movie genres and characters into something new. Two filmmakers could hardly be different than Douglas Sirk and Samuel Fuller, but “Red Scare” mixes Sirk’s “Imitation of Life” into a shaker with Fuller’s “Pickup on South Street” and pours out a cocktail of redbaiting camp that gets you rooting for the wrong characters for all the right reasons — or the right characters for all the wrong reasons.

It is in that ambivalence that the play’s genius emerges. “We must know who’s boffing who!” declares ’50s comedienne Pat Pilford (Haram), a cross between Todie Fields, Geraldine Page, Hedda Hopper and Fancy Brice who marches against Commies on her weekly radio show. “People are sodomizing each other at the drop of a hat!” Pat’s a McCarthy-esque reactionary, but it turns out she’s right: Pinkos are trying to take over Hollywood by recruiting fading matinee idols like Frank Taggart (Cooper) into their cabal of socialist dogmatists.
Frank’s wife, Mary Dale (Covington), is a star on the rise and Pat Pilford’s best friend. She’s slow to believe that Frank and the friendly ingénue Marta Towers (Renee Krapff) are willing to betray the American way of life — which includes no more star billing and the end of glamour as we know it. Frightened but determined, Mary pledges to halt the communist threat.

Covington is a one-of-a-kind performer. He’s Jack Benny and Milton Berle in the same face — his own straight-man, tickling with a deadpan glance one second, mugging with the comic timing of an atomic clock the next. Upon his first entrance, Covington twirls onto the stage in a pale-jade jacketed pantsuit with contrasting pomegranate collar, looking like Ming the Merciless gone glam. “Can I help it if I’m pretty and have a flair for fashion?” his Mary pleads. Holding his arms aloft like wings as he glides through the room, Covington’s every movement has aerodynamic elegance. He’s intense and light, and perhaps the best comic actor working on Dallas stages right now.

Cooper, looking sallow, tired and vaguely ghoulish as Frank, reads every line as if it were accented by an organ chord from a radio soap opera. Gonzales plays sinister as half William Shatner, half Orson Welles, while Krapff does something impressive with her voice, sounding at once like every ’40s-era movie actress from B-girls like Marie Windsor to Katharine Hepburn.

Director Andi Allen has a gift for this material. Even when she doesn’t insert musical cues to hammer home the camp factor, she sets the action in motion such that you’d swear a Max Steiner score is lurking backstage, in the shadows, ready to pounce like Stalin’s cat.

Director Andi Allen paints her production with an over-the-top brush...the script does call for such direction, so it's a perfect fit here. There are characters and moments for the entire company to have delicious fun with, and they all do. From Lisa Anne Haram's gossipy Pat Pilford, to Steve Lovett's Marlon Brando-ish evil henchman, to Jim Lindsay's daffy Saleslady, to Renee Krapff's "ode to Kate Hepburn" performance of a serious actress. John de los Santos provides a hysterical scene stealing performance as a houseboy who falls for his employer (a male movie star)...But there are three performances that will having you rolling in the aisles laughing and wiping tears from your eyes. Brian Gonzales provides a gut-busting performance as the sleazy, nasty Mitchell Drake. The actor seems to be channeling Humphrey Bogart, James Bond, Larry Flynt, and oddly enough Richard O'Brien's Riff Raff-all at once...Nye Cooper is hilarious as the suave-if somewhat clueless-Hollywood star...Cooper's Frank Taggert is a mixture of Cary Grant and John Barrymore (after a few drinks)...Finally there is Coy Covington in the central role of Mary Dale, the movie star. A man in drag is always funny, but after five minutes you have to do much more to sustain and carry the performance. Covington is a master craftsman (or is it woman?) in this genre. His vision of Ms. Dale is that of Susan Hayward, Ginger Rogers, and Doris Day. Covington (like Gonzales & Cooper) knows exactly which words or lines to give that extra comic touch resulting in uproarious laughter. Cooper and Covington also have sublime comic chemistry that adds yet another layer of laughs. They are the new Lunt and Fontaine of the metroplex theater family. Uptown Players is now in the midst of their third season. For the most part, this company has consistently provided noteworthy productions...they can add RED SCARE ON SUNSET in "hits" column as well.