Written by:
Tracy Gilchrist
» Order
this Issue of Curve:
Vol. 16#7
Good girls gone bad, campy musical theater, an ambiguously queer boyfriend and a real-life easy-on-the-eyes lesbian couple are just a few draws of One Way Ticket to Hell, writer Drew Taylor’s pulpy cautionary tale (in the vein of Refer Madness) now making a West Coast debut at the Marilyn Monroe Theater in West Hollywood.
The lesbian couple that sings together stays together in this production starring Kristen Howe, in a part written specifically for her, and her real-life girlfriend Erin Stoddard. Howe plays Cassandra Leigh, a gal on a wayward path to reefer, heroin and eventually an asylum, while Stoddard camps it up as Cassandra’s trouble-making hooker with a heart sidekick, Cindy. This over-the-top campfest with soon-to-be cult status is culled from material from the film of the same title, and features music by Robert Cioffi and the direction of Richard Hochberg.
Rife with tributes to 1960s style musicals, picture a cross between Grease, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Hairspray. The plot revolves around Cassandra’s journey from good girl to junkie, complete with family drama, a morally bankrupt stepfather, and a bad boy greaser named Chico. “She’s a good girl gone bad and she never goes good again,” says Howe of her character. As the classic bad influence gal pal, Cindy eases Cassandra down the sinful spiral. Stoddard gets a chance to show off her comic chops, morphing into a host of other roles within the show: a nameless Asian character, a Slovakian prison matron, and Cassandra’s nosy neighbor from across the fence.
While Cassandra and Cindy may be a couple of bad girls, audiences can’t expect them to get really bad—in that oh-so-good way—on stage. Despite the show’s campy sensibilities, Cassandra is sadly a straight girl. While the real-life L-Word-esque couple won’t be caught in any really heated lip-locks, Howe stays intriguingly tight-lipped about some mild Sapphic content lurking in the show’s subtext. “There’s an interesting nod to a moment,” Howe says cryptically.
The pair of sizzling chanteuses met while performing in a production of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s biblical extravaganza Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, in which Howe acted as standby in the role of the narrator. In the classic plot trajectory of the great American musical, the couple sang and danced their way into each other’s hearts somewhere between the footlights and the off-stage costume changes. Five years later, they’re still making beautiful music together.
Stoddard says that she and Howe love to sing together onstage and off, and she cops to a penchant for classic Indigo Girls songs—Strange Fire is her fave album—“in the privacy of [their] own home.” Although Howe gets the glory of carrying the lead role in One Way Ticket to Hell, Stoddard says there’s never any jealousy between them, and that she’s nothing but proud of her girlfriend’s immense talent. For the couple that drove from New York’s Lower East Side to Manhattan Beach, Calif.—cats in tow—to star in the show, working together is a breeze as long as they don’t take it home with them, Howe says, adding that they’re good at separating the working relationship from the personal. According to Stoddard, we won’t be seeing any career-wrecking moments à la Showgirls, when one of them throws marbles at the other’s feet.
|
