Cannibal! The Musical!
Great Beast Theater at ImprovOlympic
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Cannibal! The Musical! bursts with love for the musical form. Parker pays homage to Rodgers and Hammerstein with “This Side of Me,” a tender solo delivered by Polly Pry, the hard-nosed reporter who falls for Packer’s soft-spoken charm and fights for his release. The staccato delivery of “The Trapper Song” (sung by Packer’s archnemesis Frenchy Cabazon) is straight out of Gilbert and Sullivan: “I wake up muddy / And go to bed bloody / ‘Cause I’m a trappin’ man.” And Parker’s lyrics are insanely catchy. Even the musical low point, “Let’s Build a Snowman,” a tune about staying brave, bores straight into the pleasure centers of your brain.
Still, this Cannibal! The Musical! doesn’t quite work onstage. With only seven songs and three reprises, there really isn’t enough music to go around–a weakness the film masked with a steady stream of sight gags and eye-popping visuals. Parker made the film for less than $200,000, but it didn’t look cheap. Great Beast’s staging of Cannibal! does, and for reasons beyond the tacky props and half-finished costumes. Cheapness is suggested by the lack of effort made to translate the film to the stage. There are way too many scene changes, and every time the lights go dim (there are almost two dozen blackouts), the energy gets sucked out of the room. And it’s puzzling why a production that cut at least 20 minutes of scenes from the movie runs 20 minutes longer than it.
Kevin Rich’s simple two-person Relationship Play offers the most literal interpretation of the song, but not much in the way of depth. Rich’s script feels like a stiff academic treatise on gender studies, and the gimmick he borrows from Caryl Churchill–hammering home the idea of gender dysphoria by flip-flopping the man and woman’s gender identities–gets in the way of true character development. Todd Kreisman’s Offbeats–about a group of off-duty police officers and a would-be criminal whiling away their time at a neighborhood bar–pays more attention to narrative concerns. Each of the four patrons takes a turn spinning a yarn, and the spacious confines of the Viaduct allow these stories to spread out and really breathe. In style, Offbeats is a lot like Relationship Play, but it’s much more insightful.
