Playwright: David Cerda
At: Theatre Building Chicago
Phone: (773) 325-5252; $20-$25
Runs through: June 26
Hell in a Handbag Productions took on and conquered The Poseidon Adventure, The Birds and Carrie, but has met its match in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Inspired by the cult, camp classic shot on the cheap in just 30 days, author David Cerda creates the film lot backstory of the only picture Joan Crawford and Bette Davis made together. As Gay 101 teaches us, the aging Hollywood divas played doomed, dysfunctional, dependent sisters.
Cerda cooks a multi-layered cake and spins a thesis: protected by studio personnel and power, and driven by ego and self-doubt, Crawford and Davis lived within their own realities. You know, like Michael Jackson. As Cerda recreates key scenes from the film, Joan and Bette diverge into an alternate universe, playing out their famous rivalry just as surely as Blanche Hudson (Crawford) and Baby Jane Hudson (Davis) do onscreen. Davis' reality becomes more and more that of Baby Jane: isolated, misunderstood, despised, murderous despite the fact that she has two Oscars to Crawford's one.
Hell in a Handbag has assembled a huge cast—22—most of who do little more than move scenery in director Jay Paul Skelton's fluid, choreographic and—well—cinematic staging. Those playing Joan and Bette's daughters, film director Robert Aldrich, Hedda Hopper, the film's publicist and a few others have more substantial roles, but don't make a difference to the story.
No, this is strictly The Clash of the Titans, and there are only two of them: author Cerda himself as Crawford and Hell in a Handbag producer Steve Hickson as Davis. Their drag impersonations are dead-on in voice and look, with Cerda in particular (who has done Crawford before) capturing that Charles Bush quality of high glam and a higher chin. Not that it makes any difference, but there are three other drag performers in the show, their roles seeming to have been arbitrarily chosen. Why should Maddie Norman (the film's Elvira Stitt, the domestic) be played by a man (Ed Jones), while Hedda Hopper is played by a woman (Maggie Speer)? Surely, Hopper is a drag role if ever there was one.
In a way, How Whatever Happened to Baby Jane Happened is too much of a good thing. A fun idea with some clever execution, it's an excellent 110-minute show that runs 150 minutes with an intermission that shouldn't be there. Teetering between campy and serious, it becomes tedious and one-note in the second act. It should be edited for pace and tension with great chunks left on the cutting room floor. A parody places itself at risk if it dares to be longer than the original. In the case of How Whatever Happened to Baby Jane Happened, it's a double dare.
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