by Barbara Waldinger
From the moment David Adkins appears at a microphone wearing a baseball cap (as Eddie, the nearly bankrupt owner of Cleo’s bar on Panama City Beach in Florida) and carrying a clipboard (as Artistic Director of Education at Berkshire Theatre Group), we know that we are going to be participants in The Legend of Georgia McBride at the Colonial Theatre in Pittsfield. After the incomparable Adkins jokes his way through the usual announcements we hear before a performance, his Eddie introduces Casey, an Elvis impersonator (a terrific Michael Wartella), who is the current entertainer at the bar: talented but he doesn’t attract many customers. This is how director Isadora Wolfe conflates the audience at the Colonial with the customers at the bar. We are invited to serve both roles in this funny, outrageous, poignant, perfectly cast and performed, gorgeously costumed, rollicking evening of theatre.
Written in 2014 by Matthew Lopez, the play premiered at the Denver Center Theatre Company that year and has since been produced throughout the country. Lopez won the Olivier, Tony, and several other awards for his play Inheritance, premiering in London in 2018 and on Broadway the following year.
The Legend of Georgia McBride is the story of the aforementioned Casey, married and expecting a child. When Eddie hires a couple of drag queens (Kyle Taylor Parker, an absolute showstopper) and partner Rexy (Shayne Haley), who is too drunk to go on, Casey has a choice: get fired or take Rexy’s place, become a drag queen, and if successful earn piles of money.
Everything about this production is first class: the set, designed by Randall Parsons, including the dressing room at the bar and the living room of Casey’s apartment, is on a revolving stage. What a treat to watch one set slide away while the other slides on in a graceful rotation! For every transition between the scenes, Evan Dibbs provides Elvis songs and others that fill the gaps.
I can’t say enough about the gifted costume designer: Amy Avila. She must have had an army of assistants to construct the sensational costumes of the drag queens and the men who eventually join the show (including Eddie and Casey’s landlord Jason (E. Gray Simons III). There must have been several dressers backstage, as many of the actors exit the stage in one costume and re-enter in another—and not just the drag queens. The padding for Wartella and the ease with which he dons the different pieces and his pantihose while standing is shocking—Avila deserves thanks for making that possible. As for the wig designers: Mary Schilling Martin and Theo M. Nottke (also the makeup designer) have provided a bevy of differently colored and styled wigs in the dressing room and backstage. The lighting by Matthew E. Adelson adds much needed glamour to Cleo’s as it becomes a showplace.
How fortunate that Isadora Wolfe is both the director and choreographer of The Legend of Georgia McBride, so that the drag performances always leave us wanting more. But as we saw in her direction last fall of Metamorphoses, she works with movement as well as dance. In the case of Casey and Jo (his lovely and caring wife played by Emilie Kouatchou), Wolfe finds movements and positions that minimize Emilie’s height compared to Wartella’s until soon we become unaware of it because there is real chemistry between the couple. It was reassuring that Wolfe engaged an intimacy coordinator (Vik Abbott-Main) for the comfort of her actors. Though Wolfe told the Eagle she didn’t feel adept at comedy, she cast Parker, Adkins and Simons, who took good care of that. Above all, the director’s innate empathy for the characters and the struggles they had to go through permeates the production, underlying the comedy and the showmanship.
In the most moving scene of the play, Shayne Haley’s Rexy admonishes Casey for not knowing anything about the life of a drag queen. Rexy tells him: “I didn’t choose to be a drag queen, baby, I was born one. I don’t get to opt out when the going gets tough.” After describing a terrible beating she suffered, Rexy adds: “Drag ain’t a hobby, baby. . . Drag is a protest. . . a raised fist inside a sequined glove.” Haley is heartbreaking in this scene.
Wartella’s Casey, who enjoyed acting in high school plays, thinks of drag as just another performance or else how can he justify it to himself? To his wife? He knows he’s not gay but he’s afraid to tell her what he does. He changes back into his jeans the minute a performance ends—to re-establish his masculinity? But sooner or later, his pregnant wife is going to find out, ending in an explosive confrontation.
Wartella, who recently played the title role in The Elephant Man, is unrecognizable as Casey. He’s not only convincing as Elvis, but in the way he grows into his drag queen persona under the tutelage of Parker’s Miss Tracy Mills. We in the audience are part of that process as we cheer him on.
Talking about virtuoso performances, Miss Tracy Mills is the real deal. Parker made his Broadway debut in the original company of Kinky Boots and eventually replaced Billy Porter. Like Rexy, Tracy has had a difficult life, and while she is a fabulous drag performer, she is a tough cookie who doesn’t put up with any slackers. Ambitious and strong, feminine with a heart of gold, she will whip her company into shape and make Cleo’s a destination for the world to visit.
Adkins, who has played so many memorable roles at BTG over the last 40 years, is a wonder. At first down and out, Eddie rises to the top with the help of his drag queens. To watch him change from a nobody to a respected MC is such fun as he runs off and onstage in different outfits, finally comfortable with the language of drag performers in his introductions, until his final Chorus Line bow in a dance number wearing a sequined outfit.
As Jason, Casey’s landlord and friend, Simons III, who started with BTG as an Artist-in-Residence in 1996, has a wonderful sense of comedy. He plays a lovable, warm-hearted guy, who, nevertheless, demands his rent, pleading innocence and blaming his wife for threatening to throw out Wartella and Jo.
A few quibbles: there is no intermission in the script but Wolfe decided to put one in that didn’t feel as though it belonged—it just sort of petered out. Some scenes were slower than they might have been. And the mic worn by Emilie Kouatchou was not loud enough when Jo and Casey were sitting on their sofa a bit upstage.
But this is such an uplifting and enjoyable production—a tour de force by an outstanding cast and an unparalleled design team–that the two-week run probably won’t be long enough to accommodate all of the people who are going to want to see it.
THE LEGEND OF GEORGIA McBRIDE runs from July 31—August 16 at The Colonial Theatre, 111 South Street, Pittsfield. For tickets call 413-997-4444 or online at www.BerkshireTheatreGroup.org.
Berkshire Theatre Group presents THE LEGEND OF GEORGIA McBRIDE by Matthew Lopez. Director/Choreographer: Isadora Wolfe. Cast: David Adkins (Eddie), Shayne Haley (Rexy), Emilie Kouatchou (Jo), Kyle Taylor Parker (Miss Tracy Mills), E. Gray Simons III (Jason), Michael Wartella (Casey).
Scenic Designer: Randall Parsons; Costume Designer: Amy Avila; Lighting Designer: Matthew E. Adelson; Sound Designer: Evan Dibbs; Wig Designers: Mary Schilling Martin, Theo M. Nottke; Makeup Designer: Theo M. Nottke; Dialect Coach: Jennifer Scapetis; Intimacy Coordinator: Vik Abbott-Main; Wardrobe & Makeup: Jordan Qualls.
Production Stage Manager: Jason Hindelang.
The production runs two hours including intermission.