Stage Capsules

Dream Boy
It seems likely that before Eric Rosen wrote the script for Dream Boy, he jotted down a list of items that would give his play Southern Gothic appeal: Cemeteries, ghosts, religious zealots, murder, and abandoned plantations pop up like so many cardboard cutouts. The story and characters behind them are equally flat.

Sexually abused protagonist Nathan and his love interest, Roy, wait until well into the second half of the play to show any affinity for acting. Admittedly, their courtship is intended to be clumsy, but their awkward, stilted conversations and Nathan's static, birdlike posturing aren't enough to sustain a two-hour play. Meanwhile, the dialogue is peppered with flagrant sexual innuendoes, contradicting the pair's supposed sexual naiveté. This harvesting of cheap laughs from the audience detracts from the play's attempts to seriously deal with the more sinister themes of sexual abuse and homophobia.

The highlight of the play is narrator Leon Acord; unfortunately, he's the only character who uses language with any degree of creativity or intelligence. Many suggestive -- and shirtless -- scenes by the handsome cast are presumably intended to sustain the audience's interest through an otherwise tedious work.

--By Fiona Gow

Cabaret
Even the musical Grease!, when it came through a couple of years ago, was shamelessly tarted up, with sex jokes flying pungently over the heads of children in the audience, leaving their mothers open-mouthed; so it should be no surprise that the latest Broadway version of Cabaret descends to fist-fucking and oral sex. It's only a glimpse, and only in shadowed profile -- don't get excited -- but it's an example of what happens when a Broadway producer decides that a legendary musical about a legendarily decadent era needs to be tarted up even more.

Norbert Leo Butz's MC has the right leering smile and evil mystique; Joely Fisher's Sally Bowles has a whole range of humid, cutesy, sluttish charms. But the production is mostly show business-as-usual. Only Jay Goede, as Cliff Bradshaw, seems human, and he's boring until he starts to sing. The German and German accents are universally poor; the dancing isn't tight. This Cabaret merely goes through the motions, except for Sally's marvelously sad climactic number ("Cabaret"), and the MC's lyrical torch song, "I Don't Care Much."

The show has an indelible Broadway gloss of pseudo-decadence. Everyone knows that Disney has cleaned up 42nd Street; so it looks as if Broadway's becoming the boulevard for sex onstage in New York. I wonder if that's not by some sort of design.

--By Michael Scott Moore