Review: PSYCHO BEACH PARTY at Matrix Theatre

Psycho Beach Party is a classic summer comedy at the Matrix Theatre on Melrose through July 7th.  It is glorious, glorious fun, campy, frisky, outrageous, and hilarious from start to finish.  I was delighted to find the familiar lobby of the Matrix Theatre re-imagined into a party, the Kiki Tiki Hour, with delicious ice-blended fruity drinks, beach balls, disco lights, and a killer classic soundtrack.  I loved the inflatable dolphins, leis and sand toys for the beachy photo op, perfect if you have something to celebrate or just want to feel like celebrating.

With a swirl of total insanity, Psycho Beach Party is a campy, depraved romp gleefully blending Gidget, Mommie Dearest, Sibyl, and Hitchcock’s Marnie, in a euphoric, genderqueer mashup.  The sense of fun is so infectious, I could barely catch my breath, I was laughing nonstop.  This 1987 play is the debut re-entrance of the award-winning HorseChart Theatre Company, after being dormant for a few years.

You will especially savor Psycho Beach Party if you love tiki kitsch, Old Hollywood, Marilyn Monroe, and Hitchcock, as I do, but the comedy also functions beautifully if you are wading into these waters for the first time.  With sublime direction from Tom Detrinis and Ryan Bergmann, Psycho Beach Party is frisky, effervescent, wildly funny, and deliciously deranged.  Playwright and legendary genderqueering icon Charles Busch captures the sexed-up, overheated, drama queen, bizarro hothouse atmosphere of midcentury beach movies and melodramas.

The cast is universally great, fearless, gonzo, fun-loving and lovable.   You have everything here from a sulky, pouty, tyrannical Marilyn Monroe character performed gloriously, full purring sex kitten, by Roz Hernandez.  A leader of the pack, cool guy misogynist with a dominatrix fetish, played in male drag with an understated, mesmerizing and brilliantly layered performance by Karen Maruyama.  Of course there is also the ultimate bad mommy to top all bad mommies, played unforgettably in Joan Crawford drag by comedic genius Sam Pancake.

The cast works wonders layering insane, over the top hilarity and camp with some moments of real human poignancy and genuine sexual heat.

There are also layers of cultural reflection here that can be appreciated for the intellectually ravenous.  Underneath the madcap comedy, Psycho Beach Party is an exploration of the misogyny, homophobia, sadomasochism, child abuse, trauma, sexual politics, psychobabble, and closeted, torrid homoeroticism that lurks and frolics in some of the midcentury era’s most beloved cultural artifacts.  That the comedy never feels weighty or serious at all is part of its exuberant, campy magic.

Psycho Beach Party was originally titled “Gidget Goes Psychotic,” but the name was changed owing to concerns about copyright and lawsuits.  Gidget was a juggernaut of pop culture, with eight Gidget books, six Gidget films, and two TV series.  Psycho Beach Party’s plot, characters, and dialogue all comment on Gidget in ways minute and mighty, so strap yourself in for some detours into the surreal horror freak show known as the Gidget Multiverse.

It is universally described as “cute”, “innocent”, and “wholesome”, but the 1959 Gidget film is a pick-me Lolita fantasy on crack.  We are told young Gidget is a “tomboy”, but Gidget uncannily resembles Skipper, Barbie’s younger sister.  Gidget competes on her Malibu beach turf against high femme bitches for the attention of entirely male surfers, proving she is “not like other girls”, obviously, since girls suck. The herd of woman-hating guys frolic together in the sun, sneer at Gidget and mansplain at her all day long, while joking about raping her.  The film’s constant gang bang imagery is this tiny, underage girl surrounded by a swarm of huge, half-naked, older men, alone on the beach.  Viewers can pick between leering at Gidget’s exploited child body (Sandra Dee, her body ravaged by anoxeria and abuse) or the cavorting beefcake swarm, or just take it all in.  Of course there is a happy Hollywood ending: the surfers decide to allow Gidget to surf on a public beach and she wins their predation. Yay!

The syrupy, romantic pop ballads in the hit beach musical 1959 Gidget film go like this: “She acts sort of teenage, just in-between age / Looks about four foot three /Although she's just small fry, just about so high / Gidget is the one for me / If she says she hates you / That can also mean she loves you /  It very well may be she's just a baby / Speaking romantically / If that's a bad feature, I'll be the teacher / Shorter than girls should be / The rest of the shipment / standard equipment.”

One very curious thing about the 1959 Gidget film is that aside from the occasional no-strings-attached release with Cool Girls who “get it”, Gidget’s beefcake surfer dudes do not seem to like females much, preferring to rub oil on their golden chests all day.  Maybe these muscle daddies and frisky gym bunnies would rather be waxing each other’s boards in their tiki huts?

Lucky for us, Psycho Beach Party decides to go down that rabbit hole, because it is delightful down there.  Playwright Charles Busch is uproarious in unleashing the full camp, gender madness, and erupting closeted homoerotic volcano in Gidget.  The characters and dialogue borrowed from Gidget play a thousand times better in high camp mode, with the misogynistic insults, leering, catfighting, faux cool kid talk, muscle flexing, turgid melodrama, and sexual innuendo traded between drag queens, drag kings and flaming twinks.  Psycho Beach Party feels gleefully psychotic and off its rocker, and unexpectedly, liberating and cleansing.

The Gidget lead avatar, Chicklet, is a man in a fried blonde wig and a bikini, a brilliant Drew Droege.  Drew Droege is an absolute tornado of energy and star power and charisma, and I found that I could not stop watching him for a second.  His work here is comic genius.  The beefcake surfers are hilarious, from a surprisingly thoughtful and nuanced performance by a truly wonderful Thomas Hobson, to the delightful, over-the-top shenanigans of an on-fire Daniel Montgomery.  Chicklet’s arch-rival nemesis on the beach is a sex-crazed, man-hunting, venomous drag queen, played gorgeously by superb Pete Zias.  And on a different note, Chicklet’s best friend is the magnificent Danielle Gaither, subtle and authentic and funny, who brings a note of real sweetness, poignancy, heroism, sisterhood, and intellectual curiosity to the proceedings, much missing from the Gidget franchise’s conception of girls and women.  While Gidget is upheld as a you-go-girl YA story, its gruesome history reflects something else.

The novel Gidget appeared in 1957, published the same month that Lolita’s American edition appeared.  On the cover, Gidget describes itself like this: “a candid and refreshing novel about the glorious, sometimes painful, always exciting awakening of a young girl who wanted to grow up in a hurry.”  It was written by an Oscar-nominated screenwriter about his real-life, surfing 15-year-old daughter.  Yes, a 52-year old man, a father, wrote Gidget fantasizing about the sex life and predation of his child. Quotes from the book: “Then he kissed me. He kissed me like a father.” and “Let’s say I fall asleep. He might rape me. It had happened before.”

Sandra Dee, the first actress to play Gidget, was psychologically abused by her vicious, nightmare stage mother (who was herself just a teenager when she had her) and sexually abused and raped by her stepfather, starting at age 5.  This is the child whose body is being leered at, groped, and mocked by men twice her age in the hit Gidget films.  Later, Grease would ridicule her with “Look at me, I'm Sandra Dee / Lousy with virginity.”

Sally Field, who starred as Gidget in the uber-popular 1960s series, was also sexually abused starting at 12 by her stunt actor stepfather.  In 1964 Field discovered she was pregnant at 17.  Sally Field’s stepfather arranged for her mother to take her to Tijuana for an illegal abortion so that her underage pregnancy would not end her chances at playing Gidget on TV.  Later, Sally Field would struggle with mental health and depression, winning an Emmy for playing Sibyl, a woman suffering from multiple personality disorder, in the iconic 1976 TV movie.

Significantly, Sibyl is blended into Psycho Beach Party as a major plot twist.  It emerges that bouncy, blank young Gidget / Chicklet has multiple personalities, including the evil dominatrix Ann Bowman, seeking world domination. This an opportunity for some true comedic insanity and a star turn from lead Drew Droege as he switches between Chicklet’s incarnations.  I absolutely adored Chicket’s Southern personality.  There is a bizarre, transfixing kinky scene between Chicklet / Ann Bowman and The Great Kanaka (a play on Gidget’s muscle daddy Big Kahuna - the Gidget book also fondly calls him "Ole Cradlesnatcher").

For those of us who have witnessed Gidget suffer all the indignities and horrors awaiting her in the Gidget Multiverse, it is refreshing to finally see her avatar Chicklet in Psycho Beach Party allowed to have multiple personalities that include some actual personality, complexity, and rage.  Burn it down, sister.   

Without spoiling too much of Psycho Beach Party’s off-the-rails plot, I will just say there are nods to Sibyl, Hitchcock’s 1964 psych-melodrama Marnie, and Mommie Dearest in the closing act.  Psycho Beach Party is crazy gonzo insane, but also, strangely fitting and deeply satisfying, given what we know about the Gidget franchise and the real-life trauma, abuse and incest suffered by the girls who played her.

Sifting through Old Hollywood and vintage pop culture detritus with a fresh, irreverent queer lens brings up any number of fascinating observations.  What surprises me is not just how non-stop funny Psycho Beach Party is, but how unexpectedly thoughtful, perceptive, and gratifying the satire can be.  I savored every unhinged second of this must-see comedy.  A total triumph for directors Tom Detrinis and Ryan Bergmann, producers Steven Luff, Sami Klein, Brian Nesbitt, and Brett Aune, the sublime cast, and HorseChart Theatre Company.

Photos by Jeff Lorch. Please note that some roles are multicast.

Psycho Beach Party plays at Matrix Theatre through July 7th.  The Matrix Theatre is located 7657 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90046.  Street parking.  You can get tickets by calling 323-496-3390 or clicking on the button below:

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