©Detriot Free Press



Birmingham's Little Me Tries to Keep the Wraps on Its Drag Star
by Reed Johnson

New York - Charles Busch is perfectly willing to go out and "break a leg" - as long as he gets to do it in cha-cha heels.

He'll also be sporting figure-flattering gowns and several layers of costume jewelry when he makes his grand entrance at the Birmingham Theatre Wednesday night.

Five o'clock shadow? No problem.

"Just shave close," Busch says, "and hope for nice lighting."

In some ways, Busch starring in the Birmingham production of the Neil Simon-Cy Coleman musical Little Me is like Madonna playing the Grand Ole Opry.

In outre New York theater circles, the 37-year-old Busch is a cult celebrity best known for his outrageous drag personnas, modeled on '40s Hollywood femme fatales and blithe '50's ingenues. He's the author (and star) of such campy pop-culture parodies as Times Square's Angel, Psycho Beach Party and Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, the longest-running nonmusical in off-Broadway history.

Initially, the theater wanted to cast Debbie Reynolds or some other beloved screen diva to play Belle Poitrine, Little Me's Cinderellalike heroine. But after resoundingly negative reviews of its season-opening production, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the Birmingham dropped Blondes director Jeff Moss and hired Worth Gardner to helm Little Me.

Gardner wanted Busch, and he had the clout to get him. The former artistic director of Cincinnatti's Playhouse in the Park has overseen the Birmingham's four most commercially and critically successful shows of recent seasons: The Wizard of Oz, Annie Get Your Gun, Man of La Mancha, and a stripped-down, revisionist, country-western version of Oklahoma!.

Yet, having taken its biggest artistic risk in years in having cast Busch, the Birmingham now seems nervous about offending subscribers. Its print ads and press releases for Little Me conspicuosly omit the word "drag", although Busch is playing a woman and the show's 10 remaining actors will perform multiple, gender-flopping roles.

"We prefer the term 'non-traditional' casting," says business manager Charlotte Lally, explaining the low-key campaign.

But director Gardner says he's "astounded" at the Birmingham's "lack of marketing" for a performer of Busch's stature. "He's really a pivotal force in American theater," Gardner says, adding that "Detroit doesn't know Charles Busch from Charles DeGaulle."

"On the other hand," Gardner says, "somebody (at the Birmingham) is making a commitment, because it is not the Little Me that every other city has seen. This is not a tour company, it's being made especially for them, no matter how modestly." It's a production that could be headed to New York if it plays well in the provinces.

"Busch is a good actor. Period," Gardner stresses. "The fact that it's in drag is incidental. What actor is not in drag? Everything is an impersonation."

Jim Janek, one of the Birmingham's two New York based producers, also thinks the theater is being too skittish about Busch's starring role.

"They are a little nervous about it," Janek says. "I wish that they would relax and go with it and enjoy it. I think what's going to happen is that when word of mouth gets out about what fun this is...........look at La Cage Aux Folles."

During lunch between rehearsals (for Little Me in Manhattan), Busch is wearing a pink turtleneck, black jeans and scuffed cowboy boots over his pale, slender body. Soft-spoken, anxious and charming, he hardly fits the cliche of a screaming "drag queen" - a term he adamantly rejects.

"The term drag queen is being bandied about, it's just kind of a hip phrase to use," Busch says. "And it bugs me because - maybe I am just splitting hairs, but to me the word drag queen implies that it's, like my lifestyle, that I'm this sort of weird character who dresses in drag all the time and is a fringe member of society."

"I'm very much IN society. I'm clawing my way through it! And I don't dress up except in working hours."

Busch built a reputation as a gifted comic actor doing one-man drag shows at lower east side gay bars in the early '80s. With his uncanny ear for period dialogue and his eye for actressy mannerisms, Busch has practically rewritten the so-called 'woman's film' for the stage from a gay-camp perspective - as if Pedro Alomdovar had remade Now, Voyager and Mildred Pierce.

But lately the mainstream has been catching up with Busch.

He has a juicy drag cameo in the current feature film Addams Family Values , playing Gomez's 'glamorous actress cousin', the Countess Aphasia. A few months ago he made his classical stage debut, to poor but sympathetic reviews, as Solange in Jean Genet's The Maids.

And earlier this fall he published his first novel Whores of Lost Atlantis (Hyperion), a raucous, brightly written roman a clef about the founding of his New York-based Theater In Limbo acting ensemble.

Busch is both giddy and nervous about his Birmingham debut.

"I've sung. I've done a club act, but to be in a real big, brassy musical is a dream come true," he says. "I think if ever a show could handle this kind of casting, it would be Little Me, because the whole musical is sort of a cartoon anyway.

Based on Patrick Dennis' rudely funny 1961 best-selling book, Little Me was created as a vehicle for Sid Ceasar, who played all seven male lead roles in the original Broadway production. Fusing elements of The Perils of Pauline, Auntie Mame (which Dennis also wrote) and virtually every 'woman's film' ever written, Little Me purports to be the true confessions of Belle Poitrine, an effusive movie goddess who has gone from rags to riches on very little talent, but a genius for self-promotion.

Through a combination of seductiveness, naivete and sheer luck, she escapes the backwaters of Venezuela, Illinois, and makes romantic/financial conquests of the miserly old Mr. Pinchley, Prince Cherney of Rozenzweig and the autocratic German director Otto Schnitzler, among others.

At the Birmingham, actor Jonathan Beck Reed gets the challenge of playing the seven male roles. "They're all slightly effeminate," Reed says of his characters. "I think that's part of the burlesque kind of humour."

Actress Courtenay Collins will handle the part of young Belle Poitrine (her name means 'beautiful breasts' in French), opposite Busch's aging but young-at-heart Belle. Collins sees Belle essentially as an innocent, not as the boozy, manipulative harpie portrayed on a gloomy 1982 Broadway revival of the show. Yet she stresses the importance of Belle's sexual power over men.

"Women do it all the time, using their sexuality to get what they want," Collins says. "Look at Marla Maples."

Worth Gardner says he decided to cast Busch and to scramble the gender assignments as a way of underscoring Little Me's theme of self-reinvention. Like the heroes of Billy Wilder's classic 1959 gender-swapping comedy Some Like It Hot, Belle is open to whatever is blown her way. She's emamored of all the possibilities - social, economic and romantic - that human nature offers.

Gardner believes that recent "drag" star turns like Tootsie and Mrs. Doubtfire have retreated from the true implications of gender reversal. Both Dustin Hoffman's Toosie and Robin Williams' Mrs. Doubtfire continually take pains to remind the audience that they're red-blooded American males underneath their rouge - thus breaking the illusion of transfiguration and negating the characters feminine sensibilities.

Little Me, by compairson, won't spill the beans by having its cast appear wigless or without makeup during curtain calls.

"The kind of roles that I play are very different from Mrs. Doubtifre or Tootsie where the role is a man posing as as lady", Busch explains. "I'm just playing a female part."

"It would be one thing if I, in drag, looked really comical, and had a real big nose or was kind of hairy-chested or very masculine. But I'm small and I've got great legs and I look pretty good in those dresses! And I always played it kind of realistically, that I think the audience just kind of wanted to get into the story and basically believe me."

An astonishing mimic, Busch credits his ability to impersonate screen idols like Barbara Stanwyck, Norma Shearer and his all-time idol Ida Lupino, to his unusual upbringing.

His father, absent much of the time, instilled in Busch a love of old-fashioned Hollywood glamour.

"By the time I was 10, I'd seen and absorbed in my blood every major Warner Brothers and MGM film. My father's a big movie fan, so I'd stay up until 2 in the morning watching the late show with him. And he would quiz me! He thought it was really amusing that this 10-year-old kid could recite the list of every Academy Award winner from 1927."

Busch's mother died when he was 7, and at 13 he was sent to live in Manhattan with his widowed aunt, "kind of a cross between Auntie Mame, Lucy Ricardo and Medea."

"I was very lucky to have her because I was a very confused child," he says. "After my mother's death there were a number of years where I just sort of got lost in this fantasy world of old movies, and that's almost as bad as any drug, really."

His aunt's personality seems to have rubbed off on Busch. As Gardner puts it, "I think he has the sensibility of an old soul. He's got a wisdom about him."

Guided by his aunt's combination of badgering, cajoling and "unconditional love", Busch says he slowly overcame his space-cadet qualities. Eventually she coaxed him into Northwestern University's theater school, where he came out of his cocoon with a vengeance.

Busch and his roommate would saunter around campus in dyed hair and used fur coats, imitating their glam-rock idol David Bowie. Once, they staged a two-man revue playing Siamese twin showgirls Hester and Esther.

"I was a strange but talented student," says Busch, his surprisingly deep voice erupting into a high-pitched giggle. "People on campus didn't really quite get us."

After graduation, Busch soon realized he'd have to write roles for himself. It was the only way to express his extravagant, if fragmented, personality.

He spent ten years touring the country with his solo show, Alone With a Cast of Thousands, before he founded the Theatre-in-Limbo company at Limbo Lounge, a New York gay bar, in 1984. At the time, he was supporting himself by working as an office temp.

Busch's plays are witty pastiches of various movie genres that undercut antiquated Hollywood notions about love, sexuality and male and female behavior. In Vampire Lesbians of Sodom (1985), he played a sacrificial virgin in ancient Sodom who is bitten by a demon succubus and becomes a revenge-seeking monster. It was The Bride of Frankenstein meets All About Eve , and Busch was the classic Bette Davis character - simultaneously bitchy, acerbic, and affectionate.

In his 1987 work, Psycho Beach Party , the heroine is Chicklet Forrest, a Sandra Dee clone with a dragon-lady alter ego named Ann who wants to become "dominatrix empress of the planet Earth". Not surprisingly Chicklet's Jeckyll-Hyde personality proves to be no impediment to experiencing the thrills of sand, surfboarding and Malibu beefcakes.

Although male drag performance often veers into ugly female caricature, Busch says his plays demonstrate an unmistakable affection for women.

"Vampire Lesbians of Sodom" is basically a revision of a Bette Davis movie like Old Acquaitance where these two women are bickering and fighting but ultimately love each other and couldn't do without each other," he asserts. "My plays are all about sisterhood."

Busch identifies so completely with women that, says actor Jonathan Beck Reed, "he seems more himself when he's in the makeup and the dress and the costume. He's somehow out of place in pants."

Whether or not Little Me makes Busch a household word in Detroit or not, he's unlikely to reinvent one aspect of his life: His wardrobe.

In his Greenwich Village apartment, he keeps separate closets, one for his "boy" clothes and one crammed with his "girl" show costumes. He owns exactly one man's suit.

"Now I've got storage space too, because the lady's closet is overloaded," he says, clearly pleased with the thought.

"I suppose I could mix and match for days at this point! But sometimes I'm in trouble if I have to go out to dinner and I don't really have the pants to go with that jacket. I probably could come up with any number of lovely frocks, though they're a bit drafty."


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