You Should Be So Lucky

This "contemporary Cinderella story" by Charles Busch about a gay electrologist who inherits $10 million from an older man under suspicious circumstances has all the elements of a New Conservatory show, including tackiness, camp comedy, and a bitchy catfight on an afternoon talk show. Christopher, the electrologist, lives in a gaudily overdecorated Greenwich Village flat with his social-climbing sister Polly. They have no money or prospects until a rich stranger named Mr. Rosenberg faints on the sidewalk outside. Christopher helps him, and soon finds himself not just heir to a portion of Rosenberg's millions, but also the enemy of Rosenberg's virago daughter, an ill-dressed Scarsdale bitch named Lenore. The script is silly and sprawling -- someone really needs to edit the final scene -- and in a preview performance not all the actors had their timing under control. But Patrick Michael Dukeman makes Christopher a sympathetic Cinderella, flitting around the apartment like an unpresuming chambermaid; he also does frighteningly good work channeling Rosenberg's meathead brother Sheldon and the hideous, chain-smoking former Mrs. Rosenberg. (The play is full of ghosts.) Adrienne Krug is also very funny as Lenore. It's not the strongest play by the man who brought you The Tale of the Allergist's Wife, but Dukeman holds its frayed ends together.