The members of a Vaudeville troupe act out the tragedy of ‘Pompeii,’ with echoes in the present day.
KDT’s amazing ‘Pompeii’ looks to the past to make way for the future
ARNOLD WAYNE JONES | Executive Editor
jones@dallasvoice.com
The operators manning the Mount Olympus switchboard are gum-smacking dames from a Howard Hawks screwball comedy. “How may I direct your pray-yuh?” they drawl in Brooklynese. They are quickly replaced by two clowns, performing as if in a silent film, pulling faces and fooling around in broad strokes. Then a man in a straw boater and woman dressed for a box social sing a forgettable ditty about love (though the lyrics are more subversion than the Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy operetta they are clearly satirizing). All the while, an active volcano rumbles and burps six miles away, broadcasting the cataclysm about to happen. Nero fiddled while Rome burned; a decade later, Pompeiians put on a Vaudeville.
And two millennia later, we haven’t wised up much.
Pompeii!!, an original world premiere music hall cabaret from Cameron Cobb, Michael Federico and Max Hartman now having a short run at Kitchen Dog Theater, puts a troop of third-rate itinerant performers circa 1930 in a goofily historical variety show. Rather than featuring Shakespeare or high-kicking chorines, they are telling the story of Pompeii, a Roman city vanquished in 79 A.D. by an eruption so brutal it boiled the residents’ brains inside their skulls and swept a thriving culture into oblivion. What could they have done to stop it? Probably nothing. But they didn’t even try.
“I appreciate your ability to substitute attitude for reason,” one character nods, sounding suspiciously like a modern-day climate change denier.
That’s hardly the only cognate the show draws from the past to today (our current EPA chief wants to add a bible verse to the agency’s mission, replacing science with faith). A black man, a woman and an Irishman are given shit jobs (literally) at pennies on the dollar, but told by The Man how lucky they are to live during a booming economy; prayers only seem to come when people have selfish needs… and too late; demagoguery leads to self-fulfilling prophecy.
All of this is overseen by a demonic-looking ringmaster named Sammy Mulligan (Hartman), who’s sardonic and cynical in the tradition of the Master of Ceremonies from Cabaret or The Engineer from Miss Saigon: He snipes at his bandmates, especially his sweet-natured brother (Ian Ferguson), laughing at mankind’s failure to correct its mistakes (his name means “do-over” in golfing, an irony compounded because we seem to make the same decisions again and again). The message of the piece (don’t worry, it doesn’t beat you over the head with it) is, “Don’t just sit there — do something!”
The structure magpies its style. It’s similar to another Federico-penned musical, On the Eve, in its circusy atmosphere and unexpectedly profound ending, not unlike Chicago or Hedwig and the Angry Inch as filtered through Monty Python.
Some bits stand out: A perfectly awkward standup routine (painfully, brilliantly performed by Parker Gray); a drunken magic act stumbled through by Jeff Swearingen; the gospel-tinged delivery of songs led by Dennis Raveneau. But it’s the cumulative effect, glued together with a hummable score with smart lyrics, that lingers.
I suspect the creators of Pompeii (Cameron Cobb also directs) would appreciate cheeky one-liners in praise — “A Herculaneum effort!” “It’s pyro-fan-clastic!” — but without punning, it’s entirely proper to say you should see Pompeii simply because it’s a blast.