The cast includes, left to right, Trey Tolleson , Sonny Franks, Gabriel Ethridge, Randy Pearlman, Duke Anderson and Mikey Abrams. Photo courtesy Mike Morgan
‘Nuncrackers’ puts the holy sisters in drag
ARNOLD WAYNE JONES | Executive Editor
jones@dallasvoice.com
Dan Goggin’s play Nunsense! launched nearly 35 years ago as an underground comedy starring (usually) famous women “of a certain age” — I saw a tour in 2004 with Kaye Ballard, Darlene Love, Lee Meriweather, Mimi Hines and Georgia Engel — dressed up as nuns, spouting off quasi-sacrilegious puns and riffing on Catholicism with good-natured sarcasm. It’s the off-est of Off-Broadway-style theater.
Since its origins, though, the Nuniverse has expanded exponentially into more than half-a-dozen standalone shows, including at least two in which all the sisters are played by “brothers” — i.e., men in drag.
And of course, that’s the kind that Uptown Players is producing now at the Kalita for a brief run (it closes this weekend). Cuz that’s how they do over there.
Nuncrackers, A-Men! involves the same characters as in all the plays — imperious Mother Superior (Randy Pearlman), sensible Sister Mary Hubert (Duker Anderson), hard-talkin’ Sister Robert Anne (Mikey Abrams), charming Sister Mary Paul (Trey Tolleson) and Father Virgil (Sonny Franks, in a trouser role). It’s Christmastime, and the Mount Saint Helen’s Convent in “Noo Joizee” is putting on a pageant while the nuns jealously contemplate the swag under their tree. Things go wrong. Songs are sung. Lessons are learned. Puns are flogged. It’s all nonsense, as its title suggests, a fluffy holiday trifle.
And on that level, it works… more or less. Often less.
Comprised mostly as a series of vignettes roughly united around a Christmas theme, the play goes all over the map. I’m still not sure what the point of the song “Santa’s Little Teapot” was, and while “The Christmas Box” is a sweet ballad, it’s also maudlin and strangely out of place in what purports to be a jokey farce of a show. A gospelly finale, “It’s Better to Give,” is more justifiably out-of-place — it gets the audience happy.
It doesn’t help that Goggin isn’t much of a songwriter — he’s more of a song deviser. The second-act number “In the Convent” is a send-up of The Village People, with the melody tweaked to avoid copyright infringement, but it’s too clever by half: All idea, limp execution.
The jokes are also mostly toothless about obvious — a drunken fruitcake baking demo, mis-remembering The Nutcracker as The Ball Break; maybe Goggin has used them all up in prior shows. Maybe we’ve heard them all coming from drag queens in clubs.
Still, the actors give it their all, with Tolleson and Anderson the standouts. Like a store-bought Christmas cookie, there’s not much here too offend those who like to honor the religious overtones of the season, just a sweet, quick empty rush of calories.
