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Karl Giant
But for all its eccentricity, the production's campy celebration of all things queer feels undeniably familiar. Here we are again at P.S. 122, guffawing over the same old double entendres and drag queen mincing as if it were still the Reagan era. And maybe that's not such a bad thing—there's something sort of comforting in knowing you can still crowd into an insufficiently air-conditioned downtown theater and watch the counterculture assert itself, even if it's not exactly pushing any envelopes. In that sense, the fitfully amusing Cracked Ice at least succeeds as a chance for like-minded outsiders to reconnect with their community.
The production is written, directed, and co-stars Jennifer Miller, the director of political performance troupe Circus Amok, with additional text by playwright Deb Margolin, as well as musical stylings by Kenny Mellman (Kiki and Herb). Intertwined with the aforementioned bizarre performance art numbers is an absurdist parody of Bernie Madoff, whose victims include a bearded lady vaudeville star named Sybil Liberty. The story of her revenge is rather broad and amateurish, and the earnest monologues for a transsexual Madoff character, written by Margolin, seem strangely out of place alongside the rest of the show's high camp. But there are some great Busby Berkeley dance numbers, and enough winning one liners ("She puts the con in conceptual art!") to forgive the script's deficiencies. When it stops striving for torn-from-the-headlines relevance, Cracked Ice is a reasonably gay old time.
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I guess this is fun for some people.
Is this Borat's brother-in-law?
Somehow I think I've seen this foolishness about thirty years ago.
Wow, I bet you two are fun to be with.
At least when I wear eye makeup the color matches my blouse.
At least when I wear eye makeup the color matches my blouse.
I take issue with sections of this review, which I find to be dismissive and homophobic.
To say that the show is full of "the same old double entendres and drag queen mincing as if it were still the Reagan era," is to have decided that drag-performance, as a form, died when, say, Charles Ludlam died, and enough with those kinds of images, enough with those kinds of ideas. If a play about a straight couple having marital problems went up, no reviewer would take aim at that kind of set-up. No one would say "the same old patriarchal heteronormality as if it were still the Reagan era." Also, describing the performance style as "mincing" is blatantly homophobic.
The "sort of comforting" notion that one can "crowd into an insufficiently air-conditioned downtown theater and watch the counterculture assert itself" says to me that the reviewer wants the counterculture relegated to these kinds of venues, which he has decided are both secure and contained, and thus irrelevant, as if the counterculture (Does he mean anti-capitalists? Queers? Sequin-wearing gender-benders?) were zoo animals performing their assertions, safely behind bars.