- OTHER MEDIA
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- It's a small world after all
Lengthy Babylon Heights stumbles off the Yellow Brick Road
review in the SF Bay Guardian by Robert Avila
- Are you a good dwarf or a bad dwarf? In the storied production history
of The Wizard of Oz, there were notoriously (and no doubt, apocryphally)
so few of the former that Glinda-like attempts at taxonomy seem pointless.
They were all bad, or at least naughty, as dwarves have historically seemed
in the popular imagination. Celebrated novelist Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting)
and screenwriter Dean Cavanagh's ribald new stage comedy, however, about
four "Munchkins" housed together during the filming of Oz, brings
such stereotypes of good and evil center stage, where size may not count
at all.
Babylon Heights, receiving a rocky world premiere at San Francisco's Exit
Theatre, builds on the towering Hollywood tale that has the 100-plus dwarves
cast as Munchkins running amok in their Culver City hotel, converting it
into a den of drunken rioting and sex orgies. But if the premise climbs
to the heady stratosphere of urban legend, its story keeps us resolutely
low to the ground. First of all, its average-size actors play on an oversize
set (a dingy hotel room designed to surreal effect by Tony Kelly and Colby
Thompson), giving us a waist-high perspective on the big-people world throughout.
Moreover, the germ of its story line has to do with an even more sordid
detail in that lasting legend: the rumored suicide of an MGM Munchkin on
the set of the film (supposedly just visible in the background, swinging
from an artificial tree, in the scene where Dorothy and company set off
down the Yellow Brick Road).
With that tasty morbid morsel as an appetizer, Babylon introduces four
misfits thrown together by circumstance, each drawn for subtly different
reasons to Tinseltown's mirage utopia, not unlike Dorothy to Oz. There's
Bert Kowalski (Russ Davison), an archetypal ’30s Brooklynite
in all but stature, and a bilious, foulmouthed, raunchy little opium addict
to boot. There's Raymond Benedict-Porter (Dennis McIntyre), the self-styled
master thespian and an unctuously pretentious name-dropper (who Bert mercilessly
teases, recognizing the poseur from the circus circuit). There's the equally
disingenuous Philomena Kinsella (Brittany Kilcoyne McGregor), an Irish
working-class girl who's left the drudgery of a nunnery for the adventure
of Hollywood and who artfully feigns fearful innocence in the face of a
roomful of men. And finally there's the true innocent, Charles Merryweather
(Chris Yule), the play's own Dorothy. Cast as a Munchkin infant, the sheltered
Englishman (once in the king's employ at Kew Gardens until driven off by
big bullies) is the literal babe of the story, and its sacrificial lamb.
It sounds like a good arrangement for a saucy Rabelaisian send-up of the
existing order of things. After all, the dark corners of Oz will never
cease to fascinate. And as a depression-era tale, tall or otherwise, the
desperation, tribulations, affinities, and infighting among a far-flung
group of irregularly employed actors take on some added significance from
the vantage of the "little people." But Babylon never does much
with the themes it broaches. In fact, its sardonic comedy never really
takes off, although much of the blame could be laid at the feet of a lackluster
production that, on opening night at least, could only stumble down the
runway.
Contrary to the cavalier myth, the actors who played Munchkins in The Wizard
of Oz were more like overworked and underpaid studio fodder, and Babylon's
gritty focus plays on that harsh reality. But here at least the focus blurs,
and the surprisingly halfhearted dialogue repeatedly goes slack. Welsh
and Cavanagh probably wrote something slightly different, and no doubt
director Jesse Reese intended something a bit tighter, but it's hard to
tell going by opening night's performance (and absent the published version
of the play, which is not yet available). Merryweather's lines are decidedly
dull, confining Yule, for the most part, to one or two wide-eyed reactions.
McIntyre and Davison, meanwhile, though both capable actors, seemed to
be fishing for their lines so often that it began to resemble an evening
of unflattering improvisation. The only suitably sharp performance came
from McGregor, who immediately infuses the proceedings with much needed
energy, while helping to pick up the pace in two acts that drag out to
nearly three hours.
Leaving aside opening night missteps, for all its ribaldry, Babylon Heights
ends up giving conventional morality much less of a comeuppance than you
might expect, or would find, for example, in a wittier Joe Orton farce.
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