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Ashley Michelle, Thirsty Burlington and Dana Danzel as the Painted Ladies light it up. |
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David Mitchell’s Scarbie covers a wide range of characters, including Lily Tomlin’s phone operator, Ernestine. |
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Boys will be girls at The Crown
By Susan Rand Brown
Banner Correspondent
It’s Saturday night in Provincetown, the first full weekend of summer, and Commercial Street is alive with locals and tourists; a pea-soup thick fog magnifies the loopy buzz. It’s time to celebrate the thriving tradition of cross-dressing and the artist-entertainers who do it their way with a trio of headliners performing through the summer in the Cabaret at The Crown & Anchor.
David “Scarbie” Mitchell’s “Lip-Schtick,” first on stage at 7:30 p.m., is far from a warm-up. A Florida native and serious sculptor in ceramics with his own art website and lots of figurative pieces marked “sold,” Mitchell’s “Scarbie” routine is made unique by his confessional, story-telling style — more actor or performance artist, weaving back and forth between his own voice and celebrity impersonations.
The stage is set with a mirrored wig stand, placing the artifice front and center: changes in persona — done less with wigs and costumes than attitude — help move the act along. Sure, Scarbie flips wigs with the best of them, lip synching her way through songs and patter of a Lily Tomlin and Carol Burnett, women who themselves tried on various “female” styles and voices, but she-he also stands before us wig-less, as if to say, the artifice we share depends not on costuming but on the imagination.
This is me, the whole person, Scarbie implies; my life-long passion for dress-up is an “act” but not an act. Or, as the show card reads, the experience is “one boy’s journey to the fabulous and back.”
If “Scarbie” registers on the gentle, sentimental side, “Dina Martina,” on the same stage at 9 p.m., is all brass and balls. (As one regular fan commented, she’s “scary but good.” Publicity material refers, more formally, to “a train wreck in heels.”) A demented Alice in her own Wonderland, the Dina Martina deal, conceived by Seattle performer Grady West, is a send-up of the cross-dresser (or anyone at all) as glam queen, an inverse American Idol where all performers are deliberately off-key and graceless.
In a shapeless red sequined mini-dress, she sashays to a raucous disco beat; the pulsing, thumping vibe never lets up. Her trademark crimson lipstick painted way above the lip-line, Dina Martina uses mouth and voice as a comic instrument, with words given their own strange accent: Provincetown is pronounced more like “Provence-town,” as in France. And she lisps.
The regulars know what to expect. Take-homes from Martina’s goofy bag of goodies (baddies?) run from evil-looking gummy-worms to pink key-ring toilets; tall tales of loser boyfriends who broke her tiny heart; a singing voice (real-time, since no recording could match her amplified, distorted Cookie Monster sound) that suggests the rasps and snarls of the post-punk era.
Martina’s videos, with her doll-like face enlarged and superimposed onto scenes from other over-the-top parodies of popular culture, continue this vein of the tasteless and tacky. Celluloid snips of Busby Berkeley dance extravaganzas of the 1940s, Village People disco routines, and even Jimmy Stewart in the soppy Christmas epic “It’s a Wonderful Life,” itself a knowing wink on family life, are given unexpected life as part of the Dina Martina routine; it’s the history of our gay times, closeted and not, under the microscope and on steroids.
“Painted Ladies in Mirror Image,” with Dana Danzel (played by Titus Ulrich), Ashley Michelle (of the same name) and Thirsty Burlington (Scott Townsend), performing at 10:30, do more than their show title implies. They’re not only mirror images of the glamorous or just plan famous women entertainers they impersonate: they’re larger than life, often better than the real thing. As a woman seated next to this reporter quipped, “Celine Dion never looked so good.”
Unlike Scarbie who plays off the act of gender-bending itself, or Dina Martina who performs an ironic commentary on traditional drag, “Painted Ladies” comes closest to a sincere homage to the real thing: and the effect on a mixed audience of gays and straights, couples and groups, is electrifying. As a trio, there is ample time to change costumes between power numbers, and change they do. No potential for sequined, body-shaping artifice is left behind. (Those three guys look great.)
Since the celebrities impersonated are themselves deliberately over-the-top, each lovingly crafted, lip-synched portrait is a treat approaching a stadium concert situation. There’s usually a twist, though. Thirsty’s instantly recognizable Michael Jackson from his “Thriller” period — angular dance moves and a black-and-white military jacket — involves a bottle of Clorox, a prop inciting audience hysterics, feeding Thirsty’s dead-pan “Only in America can a poor black boy grow up to be a rich white woman”; Ashley as Bette Midler in “The Rose,” looking eerily like the real thing in a curly red wig and bright red dress, and also as bad Boy George, belting out “I’m a man without conviction …”; Dana’s Cindy Lauper, a girl having twisted fun; and Thirsty’s Amy Winehouse, who fits right in to the canon of big-haired women (and men) in trouble.
David “Scarbie” Mitchell’s “Lip-Schtick” performs in the Cabaret at the Crown and Anchor, 247 Commercial St., Provincetown, Thursdays through Sundays, 7:30 p.m., through Aug. 31; “Dina Martina," during July, Thursdays through Sundays, 9 p.m., during August, Wednesdays through Sundays, 9 p.m., and through Sept. 13, Fridays and Saturdays, 9 p.m.; “Painted Ladies in Mirror Image,” Thursdays through Sundays, 10:30 p.m., through Aug. 31. There is a separate admission for each show. For ticket information, contact (508) 487-1430, or www.onlyatthecrown.com.
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Jul 3rd, 2008