Review: SLAY IT WITH MUSIC IN CONCERT Brought The Comedy & Mystery To The Green Room 42 & Left Us All Laughing For A Good Cause

Heigh-Ho Friends & "Family"! Bobby Patrick your RAINBOW Reviewer here. Putting the silent T in CABARET to bring you all the T.

So my loves, what do you get when you mash up the plots of "Whatever Happened To Baby Jane" + "Sunset Boulevard" + "The Bad Seed" + some spoofy "Die Die My Darling" sauce (on the side)? You get "Slay It With Music, A MUSICAL CHILLER" which is exactly what Bobby got at The Green Room 42 on Saturday Night, and it was indeed all laughs for a good cause. "Slay it With Music In Concert" played to an ample house to benefit the INTERNATIONAL RESCUE COMMITTEE, a global humanitarian aid, relief, and development nongovernmental organization founded by, get this, Albert FREEKIN Einstein (His actual full name lambkins... j/k). The IRC provides emergency aid and long-term assistance to refugees and those displaced by war, persecution, or natural disaster, so what's not to LOVE about them?

Now history lesson my dearlings; "Slay It..." was staged Off-The-Broadway some 2ish decades ago and featured; Susan Bernstein, Louisa Flaningam, Virginia Sandifur, Barry Williams (GREG BRADY!! OMG!), Janet Metz & J.P. Dougherty and was penned by Michael Colby (Who introduced the evening) with music by Paul Katz and costumes by Michele Reisch, who happened to be at our table on the night and was a delightful show buddy. Explaining her history a bit, Michele let slip that she was also costumer for Colby's more well known Off-The-Broadway Musicale "Charlotte Sweet" which played over 100 performances August - November 1982 and garnered Colby a Drama Desk Nom for his lyrics. "Charlotte" had a similar concert treatment last year at Feinsteins/54 Below.

For this evening's concert, our "Slay It..." cast featured: Alex Getlin, Marianne Tatum, Sharon McNight, Eddie Korbich, Tom Wopat (LUKE DUKE!! OMG!), Caroline Conceison and the fabulous NYC cabaret veteran Eric Michael Gillett keeping it light and funny with new material by Colby for scene setups and connecting narration. What we have here is a comedy, musicale, murder mystery, mash-up, spoof with Meta "Baby Jane" themes of being a Hagsploitation musicale about faded movie star, Enid Beaucamp (McNight) getting a come-back opportunity with a Hagsploitation slasher flick, on the very day her Soap Opera Diva sister, Marci Beaumont (Tatum,) lands on her doorstep because her Soap Opera has been canceled. So... you get the idea my loves, right? This mixed bag of material, themes, and jokes came from Colby in that halcyon (What? ... Bobby knows words!) era of camp spoof-dom surrounding the works of the Charleses Ludlum & Busch. So this concert was right up my ol' campy rainbow. I laughed a lot at "Slay It..." even if some of the humor was corn right off the cob. With lyrics like "It's tough to be told news that you've become old news," and camp jokes such as referring to wheelchair-bound Beaumont as "Peer Gimp" and an astrology gag like, "You've got Pluto in Uranus," Colby's book strikes the absurd chord that a silly Meta Hagsploitation within a Hagsploitation within a satire of all of the above should. With flashbacks galore, we get the story of how the central sisters became suspects in the central murder at the center of the play. These flashbacks allow 3 of the cast to switch off playing multiple daffy roles.

And speaking of our players: Sharon McNight's belt-y, trumpet-like voice, and desperate movie star character, Enid Beaucoup, was a well proportioned over the top counterpoint to Marrianne Tatum's twittery, soprano soap opera diva, Marcy Beaumont (born Marci Beaucoup {groan}). The ladies' chemistry was only slightly encumbered by the use of concert books from which they read their parts. The customary Butler/Manservant role, MAX Von Zell, was taken on by the hilarious and impossibly high voiced tenor Eddie Korbich, providing excellent support to his leading ladies. The rest of the 7 named characters were distributed amongst the 3 talented, supporting stand-outs of the show, Alex Getlin, whose wonderfully funny tour guide of Hollywood homes character Rosemarie Clinger dropped most of the kernels-of-corn humor throughout the script, the uber-cool Tom Wopat, whose wonderful baritone and understated comedy brought life to the roles of 2 ill-fated murder victims and the sisters' flashback father, and finally, there was Caroline Concesion, who acquitted herself fine as young Marci Beaucoup, but hit it out of the park with her Patty McCormack/Bad Seed Jill Little, who reveals all the mystery behind the mystery at the end of the show - no spoilers! Oh OK, Her Grandmother did it! No for real, her grandmother, whom we never meet, was behind it all.

As a book-in-hand concert performance, Charles Repole's direction shines most in the campy character development of his cast, and Phil Reno's musical direction makes the utmost of his piano and the powerful voices of his singers. In the end, the audience began to slip away from the show slightly, not because of anything happening or not happening on stage but owing to what seems to be a chronic inability on the part of The Green Room 42 to properly manage their climate control. Too warm and Bobby gets sleepy my lambs, and I was not the only one, judging by the fanning of programs I saw on the night. This heat, along with what a lady at my table called GR42's 42-minute chairs (Plexi/plastic monstrosities that are always hell on Bobby's backside) and 80 or so minutes of show can seem like an eternity.

Finally, Colby & Katz's show is much-ado about a lot of silly camp, but camp is a dying art, as the days of the silver screen grow more and more remote - so it was great fun to be in the house for this spoofy romp. We don't know if there will ever be more life for "Slay It With Music" but it was a fun night of CABARET my dear ones, so Bobby Gives This One 3 ½ rainbows out of 5.

Follow Michael Colby's webby: HERE
Sharon McNight's webby: HERE
Eric Michael Gillet: HERE
Tweet Tom Wopat (LUKE DUKE!): HERE

Mariann Tatum has a webby: HERE

The Marvelous Alex Getlin can be found: HERE
And the equally Marvelous Caroline Conceison has a webby: HERE

And Of course, the evenings beneficiary of this benefit concert The IRC is: HERE

photo credits to: Joe Clarke & Elizabeth Wolynski

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