The phrase "original S&M musical" contains multitudes. It could describe a thin gimmick, or a welcome break from cliché. Either way, it sounds like something, and Something, even an ambitious failure, is always better than Nothing.
Sadly, The Spinning (by Balagan Theatre at Capitol Hill Arts Center) is less Something than one would hope. There are riding crops and leather, songs, dances, and simulated sex acts. But everything (the stock-musical music and dialogue, the actorly acting) is more simulated than stimulated.
The story concerns lovers manipulated by a pack of kinky Cupids, a modern Midsummer Night's Dream but with only one couple, and the sprites wear leather and rubber and occasionally flog each other. The people meet in a bar (of course) and endure the standard-issue turbulence of early romance (misunderstandings, tempting exes) while the sprites toy with the couple and fight among themselves. (The head sprite is muscular über-sadist Groll, played with nasty exuberance by Geoffery Simmons, who gives the most inspired performance but has a scenery-chewing habit.)
The rest is mediocre. The sprites speak in a lofty fakespeare; the music doesn't deviate from the formula of musicals: jumpy ensemble numbers, mawkish arias, lovelorn duets. Its blues number, sung by Groll ("I've got a girlfriend/And she hates my fucking guts") is a pleasant deviation, but it sounds out of place, like it was written for something else. Even the parts that should sell themselves, including a fairy battle royale and human-sprite orgy, seem fainthearted and dull. How did they manage to ruin a human-sprite orgy?
Campy Kafka
In the Kafka Colony is Something. The play (at Open Circle Theater) is a bit like a colony, populated with characters and scenes from Kafka's fiction and biography. There are jackals and Arabs, a torture machine, pornography in a magistrate's office, talk of Zionism and publishing, a vulture choking on the guts of his human victim. Half the pleasure is being reminded of stories you've read and forgotten—the script, by Seattle's Dustin Engstrom, is a random walk through Kafka's bibliography. The dialogue is mannered, but so are the stories it draws from. A few scenes are lame, but the actors (especially Bradley McDevitt, once of the UMO Ensemble) are comfortable and capable. Neither they nor the playwright takes the material too seriously (which would be fatal) and there are even some moments of camp: a few squirts of blood, an amorous ape. (That part is gross.)
There's a black wood silhouette of the old Prague skyline stretching across two sides of the stage. (That part is gorgeous.)
Briefly Noted
From Marc Salem (mind reader who'll be at the Moore this weekend): "The show kind of grew out of classroom research we did when I was a research assistant for Sesame Street. I'm not a psychic, not supernatural, not a superman... A lot of the people who do this act superior, and are dark and distant, and not funny."
