How to Be a Secret Agent Girl as Seen on Television and in Movies

How to Be a Secret Agent Girl is a good title for only two skits in this collection of performance art and comedy pieces by Cathleen Daly. Most of them are about gender roles, and most of the gender-role pieces have to do with a beauty contest that gets progressively ugly. In "The Peep Show," for example, one of the contestants does a striptease involving pink marshmallow Peeps and Hostess cupcakes. In "And the Winner Is ...," the beauty crown goes to "Miss 2.9% APR Financing," but Miss Glad Pants and the others aren't happy about it. Later, they run Miss 2.9 down and grind her face into the dirt, in slow motion, to the Chariots of Fire theme. These beauty contest pieces, like the whole collection, are a bit uneven, but they're saved by a lack of dialogue; material that could be self-conscious has been directed (and choreographed) by Daly with a strong sense of humor. Natalie Saibel gives consistently lively performances, and Daly's solo pieces are always good, weird fun. The strangest and most entertaining part of the whole evening is "Pirate Song," an uncanny folk-music impression of a dirty old pirate in love.