Poseidon! An Upside Down Musical, Hell in a Handbag Productions, at the Theatre Building Chicago. The ultimate disaster movie, The Poseidon Adventure is a dizzying mix of good and bad. Example: Shelley Winters transcends her role as a walking fat joke in a death scene that would make Nurse Ratched weep. Then Ernest Borgnine delivers her epitaph: “You had a lot of guts, lady.” (Sound of screenwriter missing own pun.) “A lot of guts.” The film would send itself up even absent its audacious Exodus-meets-the Inferno allegory. Throw in gloriously 70s production values and a one-track plot with the momentum of a freight train, and you’ve got a text that screams for the camp/drag/musical treatment perfected by Sweetback Productions–from which most of the Handbag company hails–before its split into warring camps.
