Titania (Julie Halston) faces a crisis with her daughters in Fairycakes (photo © Matthew Murphy)
FAIRYCAKES
Greenwich House Theater
27 Barrow St. at Seventh Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 21,
www.fairycakestheplay.com
I came specially armed to see Douglas Carter Beane’s Fairycakes at the Greenwich House Theater earlier this week. There wasn’t a lot of positive buzz surrounding the campy musical, and its initial closing date of January 2, 2022, was quickly revised to November 21, 2021, a fact unfortunately visible at the entrance. My companion for the evening was a good friend who swore by Xanadu, the Tony-nominated 2007 Broadway musical, about Greek muses in leg warmers on roller skates, for which Beane had written the book. If anyone was going to see the potential inherent joys in Fairycakes, it was her.
Alas, we both agreed in this case that Beane’s new show is a hot mess with a convoluted narrative that feels like a high school senior play, albeit with a handful of superb actors. The cast, highlighted by the wonderful Kristolyn Lloyd, is exuberant, probably because they truly love performing the material and not because they’re glad they have to do so for a much shorter period of time than originally contracted for.
Fairycakes is a chaotic mashup of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and classic fairy tales, written and directed by five-time Tony nominee Beane, whose previous shows include The Little Dog Laughed, The Nance, Lysistrata Jones, and Sister Act as well as the 1995 film To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. The music is by Beane’s longtime collaborator Lewis Flinn, with corny, repetitive choreography by Ellenore Scott. The ornate, DIY costumes are by Gregory Gale. It all unfurls on Shoko Kambara and Adam Crinson’s goofy set, with a movable wooden doorway behind which characters sometimes hide (although depending on where you sit, their sudden appearance might not be a surprise), a tree stump, and a forest backdrop.
On a magical night, the bare-chested Puck (Chris Myers) waves an aphrodisiacal flower around the characters, creating unexpected romantic pairings involving Gepetto (Mo Rocca), Pinocchio (Sabatino Cruz), Cinderella (Kuhoo Verma), pirate Dirk Deadeye (Arnie Burton), Prince Viktor (Jason Tam), Sleeping Beauty (Z Infante), and Peter Pan (Jamen Nanthakumar). Meanwhile, Oberon (Burton) and Titania (Julie Halston) are in a fight that, if they don’t resolve, will lead to the death of their children, Peaseblossum (Lloyd), Moth (Jackie Hoffman), Cobweb (Infante), and Mustardseed (Ann Harada). Also flitting about are a tinkling fairy (Hoffman), a cricket (Nanthakumar), a mermaid (Harada), a changeling (Nanthakumar), Cupid (Tam), an evil stepmother (Nanthakumar) and her plotting stepdaughters (Rocca and Cruz), Aurora, Goddess of the Dawn (Verma), and Queen Elizabeth I.
Until a switch in the second act, everyone speaks in stilted, self-referentially cutesy verse with far too many forced rhymes, and the narrative veers off into confusing subplots exacerbated by the inability of Beane to use the actual names of the characters from Peter Pan, the legacy of which is carefully protected by the J. M. Barrie estate.
That said, there were people in the audience the night my friend and I went who were having a great deal of fun, especially one person sitting behind us who was snapping, calling out gleefully, hooting, and snorting in approval. I wish we were watching what he was watching.