Idris Seabright (Everett Quinton) is visited by her hot and sexy long-lost nephew, Ricky Ricardo (Jason Cruz), in DROP DEAD PERFECT (photo by John Quilty)
Theatre at St. Clement’s
423 West 46th St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Wednesday – Monday through October 11, $69
845-786-2873
www.dropdeadperfect.com
Back for a return engagement following a run last summer at the Theatre at St. Clement’s (after originating in 2013 at Penguin Rep in Stony Point), Drop Dead Perfect is an over-the-top campy melodrama that is too clever for its own good, trying too hard to be too many things when a clearer focus would have sufficed. Which is not to say it isn’t worth seeing, primarily for the performances of Ridiculous Theatrical Company veteran Everett Quinton and Jason Edward Cook as sisters who evoke the battling siblings played by Joan Crawford and Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? as if directed by Douglas Sirk. In a cottage in the Florida Keys in 1952, drama queen Idris Seabright (Quinton) cares for her plants, doesn’t care much for her dog, Teddy, and keeps making changes to her will, confusing her lawyer, Phineas Fenn (Timothy C. Goodwin), who hangs around the Seabright home because he’s got the hots for Idris’s blonde bombshell of a sis, Vivien (Cook). When young Cuban hunk Ricardo (Jason Cruz) arrives, claiming to be Idris’s long-lost nephew, the intrigue ratchets up in a flurry of love, lust, greed, treachery, deception, incest, and double and triple entendres. The script, written by the pseudonymous Erasmus Fenn, explains, “Playful abandon is what is important within the framework of a B Grade TV melodrama,” but unfortunately, too much of Drop Dead Perfect feels like “a B Grade TV melodrama” itself, even with tongue, and other body parts, firmly placed in cheek. (This raunchy comedy is most definitely not for kids.)
Jason Edward Cook and Everett Quinton star as battling sisters in campy noir farce (photo by John Quilty)
Directed by Joe Brancato (The Devil’s Music: The Life & Blues of Bessie Smith) with a nonstop bravado, Drop Dead Perfect mixes Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Key Largo with Roger Corman’s A Bucket of Blood and lots of I Love Lucy; there are endless references to Lucy, Ricky Ricardo, and Fred and Ethel (Mae Potter) Mertz that are funny at first before growing stale and tiresome. James J. Fenton’s sitcomlike set is cozy, Charlotte Palmer-Lane’s costumes are spot-on, and William Neal’s score is appropriately exaggerated, as are the phallic sculptures that Vivien makes in order to win a scholarship. (She titles one of them “Life in Hard Times.”) It’s always a thrill to see Obie and Drama Desk Award winner Quinton (The Mystery of Irma Vep, A Tale of Two Cities), who does some fab scenery chewing, matched bite for bite by Cook (Grinch, The Underclassman), but Cruz can’t quite keep up, his hot Latino gestures overblown. “Not since Jane Austen or Harlequin have we seen such a tale,” Goodwin says as his character’s son, who serves as narrator. It’s just that kind of bluster that prevents Drop Dead Perfect from sustaining itself for the full ninety minutes, trying to be more than it is. Sometimes a little subtlety is more than welcome.