| « Boy Gets Girl Gets Everything Wrong | Radius: A Sonic Lens » |
Review Wed Jan 23 2013
Miami Nice: A Tale of Good Golden Girls Gone Bad
"Who will wheel around my oxygen?" and "Will my mother ever die?" were among many important questions in the random, risqué and hilarious Miami Nice: A Golden Girls Musical.
In the Chicago neighborhood of Bucktown, within the small, 80-seat Gorilla Tango Theater, there's a charismatic pianist who begins every performance of Miami Nice by asking the audience for suggestions for specific nouns and verbs, an adult mad-lib of sorts, to be used later in the show for improv. Our suggestions ranged from "dirty sock" to the word "cantankerous." She set the tone for the show, leaving the audience laid back and ready to laugh even before the actors appeared on stage.
Then there were the actors -- men as women, and women as men -- dressed in their finest Golden Girls getup. The whole theater was bent over laughing before five minutes of the show had passed. Who knew that combining some real musical and acting talent with crossdressing, a wholesome 1980s television show, and a dash of melodrama could be so funny?
The characters are familiar to most of us. There's the awkwardly tall and mannish Dorothy Zbornak, whose sole goal in the play is to find a man who she can love and who can love her. Dorothy lives with her outspoken mother Sophia, the promiscuous Blanche Devereaux, and seemingly dull-witted Rose Nylund, whose lack of intellect is the perfect cover for her life as the mastermind of a cocaine ring. Through a high-energy series of lyrically cunning songs and a cheesecake business gone wrong, the four women's picturesque lives devolve into an every-man-for-himself style race to the finish.
Miami Nice has been extended by popular demand through Jan. 26. The musical plays at the Gorilla Tango Theater in Bucktown, 1919 N. Milwaukee Ave., this Friday and Saturday at 7:30pm. Tickets are $20.
