Photograph by Jill Ritter Lindberg, courtesy of New Line Theatre
I reached up into the top of the closet and took out a pair of blue panties and showed them to her and asked ‘are these yours?’ —"I Made a Mistake," Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski had a wicked sense of humor, but as any fan of Bukowski's poems and novels can tell you, he had a wicked sense of everything—depravity, injustice, lust, depression, joy, work, folly. His legacy may be as an American Baudelaire, who embraced hedonism without shame, but like Baudelaire, he throttled not just bottles of booze but life itself by the throat.
Bukowsical riffs on the life and work of Bukowski in the form of a wild musical bursting with simulated sex, four-letter words, and clever lyrics. It's the perfect piece of theater for a sophisticated urban crowd looking for pure ribaldry on a Saturday night.
The musical starts out with sick lyrics scored disjunctively to bouncy music. Listen closely for gems like “scratching your crotch and ya run out of Scotch” or "face the truth, ya dirty bastard / you write better when you’re plastered.” It's a gleeful mockery of the poet, dead and unable to defend himself. There are also so many winks at the audience and meta-moments in this one, you can't see to the bottom of the irony. It's relentlessly clever, so much so that that the cute, witty rhymes—and the sexual humor—eventually slide off the audience like water off a duck's back. Jokes about shtupping and drinking set to sweetly innocent tunes do not so much build as issue forth from a conveyor belt, one quickly followed by a similar one.
High points include a singing liquor bottle named “Sweet Lady Booze,” and an interlude where the poet reckons with the ghosts of William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, William S. Burroughs, and Sylvia Plath. The songs relate a loose biography of Bukowski, including formative moments of being beaten by his dad and verbally abused by a teacher. If your sense of humor is sufficiently dark, you can laugh at child abuse—or anything—depending on how it's presented. It worked for me.
The show seemed to pivot around one number that took the humor to new heights, "Chaser of My Heart." It's a tender ballad between Bukowski (Zachary Allen Farmer) and his gal, a certain "One True Love" (Kimi Short), two dipsomaniacs at a bar who can barely stand. Their drunk pas de deux, punctuated by exclamations of emotion or something like it, is a marvel. However, the performance is compromised by song lyrics not enunciated clearly or slowly enough to be fully understood, or lost amid the music of the live band.
The eight-person cast and four-piece band are rarely still in this high-energy, dance-filled musical. They're working hard, and Farmer as Bukowski sweats so profusely he has to mop his head continually with a towel. Singing standouts included Kimi Short as “One True Love.” She's got pipes.
The set features hilarious silhouettes of mudflap-style nudes on the floor. Absurdly colorful costumes contrast with the show's unwholesome lyrics nicely.
As a depraved hyperbole riffing on Buk's slimebag reputation, Bukowsical is a hoot. This is the sort of goofy, lead-with-your-pelvis, sharp late-night comedy that’s perfect for a city with a thriving, risk-taking alt-theatre scene, like Chicago or New York. (Calm down. We have great and wonderfully weird theatre in St. Louis—but we don’t have two dozen companies pushing the envelope every Friday night.) We’d like more of this brand, please.
But it never sinks its teeth into Bukowski’s work or its meaning with any depth, nor does it intend to. The musical satire is harmless entertainment, but Bukowski’s best work, alternately challenging, angry, defeated, funny, and yes, drunk and horny, is a treasure that has little to do with this outré romp.
Bukowsical, presented by New Line Theatre. Through June 22 at Washington University South Campus Theatre (the former CBC High School), 6501 Clayton Road, 314-534-1111, newlinetheatre.com.
