Review: THE NANCE at 1st Stage

Douglas Carter Beane's 2013 play, The Nance, packs a huge quantity of three different histories--theatre, gay, and New York politics--into a play that is also a love story. As a negative epithet, "nance" shares space with all the other N-words for gay men. But as a stock character in burlesque, a nance was just one of the bananas tasked with causing comedy for the audience in between the ladies' sets so that the women could step offstage and change their g-strings. The moment in The Wizard of Oz when a limp-wristed Cowardly Lion says, "Put 'em up, put 'em up" was Bert Lahr doing a nance. Bill Hader's character Stefon on "Saturday Night Live" recently continued this centuries-old tradition. In this production, Michael Russotto's sensational performance as the titular Chauncey Miles makes sense of everything else that defines a nance.

Burlesque had been around for decades by the time New York Mayor LaGuardia started making New York more G-rated in the run-up to the New York World's Fair of 1939; when he appointed former Broadway actor and producer Paul Moss his Commissioner of Licenses in 1934, Fiorello began to "clean up" entertainment venues which featured R- or X-rated performance. The fictional Chauncey and his colleagues at the actual Irving Place Theatre near Union Square are thus threatened with having their shows shut down. As Chauncey points out late in Act I, the women in the show are never naked, and the comics use nothing more than double entendres, slapstick, and suggestive nudging and winking. But such things were and still are too subtle for the Puritans among us. The Nance also tells the story of the romance between Chauncey and Ned (the sturdy Patrick Joy) which sheds ever-darkening light on the way gay men's reliance in the past on hook-ups in order to stay safe if closeted impairs relationships and creates the self-loathing that Mart Crowley defined so clearly in The Boys in the Band. Playwright Beane layers his various topics; as the comics alternate with musical numbers in the show scenes, the backstage stories of Ned, Chauncey, and the other performers also alternate.

Michael Innocenti ably plays Efram, Chauncey's onstage comic foil. Their rendition of the old vaudeville/burlesque sketch, "Slowly, I turned. . . " is fabulous (better than the version by The Three Stooges), and together they provide a hilarious overview of the kind of comedy that seldom happens live anymore ("Saturday Night Live" is live in a box); there are no double-acts in contemporary stand-up. Innocenti and Russotto are aided and abetted by the bulls-eye rim shots of drummer Jim Hofmann, one-fifth of Music Director Joe Walsh's terrific upstage combo.

Jonathan Dahm Robertson (Scene Design) somehow fit the five of them upstage, created a performance space for the show scenes, an apartment for Chauncey, and the Automat where Ned and Chauncey first meet without ever making the stage seem crowded. Kendra Rai's costume design includes all the clothing and lack of it for the show sequences and everyone's authentically styled 1930s street wear. There are more costumes in The Nance than actors, and every garment is perfect, even if one of them is a garter belt. Jennifer J. Hopkins' choreography is never above any of the actors' pay grade, which is fitting because dance was not the mission of burlesque; anyone with hips can "meet you round the corner/in a half an hour." The ladies bumping and grinding through the evening are a fine trio: cute Day Ajose, sultry Sally Horton Imbriano, and actual triple-threat Natalie Cutcher. Patrick Joy charms as Ned who evolves during The Nance from a furtive, inexperienced kid to a very nice man. Director Nick Olcott has harnessed all this talent flawlessly, and the greatest of these is Michael Russotto.

Chauncey Miles is a tough role. He's a nelly comic onstage and a sharp-tongued queen off. He's kind and smart and generous and capable of sudden, intense cruelty. The stress of living the way gay people lived until social norms changed enough to enable them to integrate underpins Chauncey's ways; Russotto endures and reveals the pain and crystallizes the camp comedy. Beane writes an 11 o'clock scene for Chauncey which resembles "Rose's Turn" in Gypsy. Russotto, playing Chauncey in drag onstage for his final performance at Irving Place, has to hold emotion in while letting feeling out: a sensational performance.

Michael Russotto as The Nance (2 hours 45 minutes) runs through April 21 Photo by Teresa Castracane.

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