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"Masters of the Impossible" Siegfried & Roy are
among the highest-paid entertainers in the world -- Forbes
says they'll make more this year than Frank Sinatra or Andrew
Lloyd Webber. Which is astonishing because they don't do
anything. Oh, sure, they make a lot of entrances in their
show at Radio City, and they make a lot of things appear and
disappear. But you don't have to be Penn & Teller to know
that such things as trap doors and stunt doubles exist.
Somewhat more skill is displayed by the chubby-buttocked
dancers who frolic to a grotesque array of recorded music;
between the disappearance and reappearance of the elephant,
they lip-synch to the resurrection theme from The Gospel at
Colonus. The only real energy of the evening is provided
by an exuberant team of jump-roping, basketball- playing black
unicyclists. Roy Horn, the dark-haired headliner, is the Vanna
White of the evening, ushering animals on and off without
saying a word. Siegfried Fischbacher, unfortunately, talks
almost incessantly, in broken English, during the second half.
As he works the aisles like Liberace, absentmindedly welcomes
the crowd to Las Vegas, and relates a rambling would-be
inspirational rags-to-riches story in which S&R's crowning
achievement is the huge picture of them in the Times Square
Kodak ad, perhaps irony is too much to hope for, but a little
charm would be nice.
Meanwhile, at the Criterion Center, playwright-satirist Chris
Durang is giving a perfectly witty deconstruction of a cabaret
act. To illustrate the concept of "special
material," he and his backup duo, Dawne (John Augustine
and Sherry Anderson), perform a zesty rendition of "Liza
with a Z." For the obligatory Sondheim selection, the
three of them handle the six-character ensemble number
"Weekend in the Country" from A Little Night
Music. Durang's schoolboy-crisp enunciation wreaks deadpan
mockery on songs by Michael Jackson and Madonna. And as the
exhausted headliner naps on the Equity cot, his supporting
cast delivers a medley of dog songs: "How Much Is That
Doggie in the Window?" followed by the dog duet from Sunday
in the Park with George and the love song from The Lady
and the Tramp. The show's targets are often less than
obvious, and the execution is as frequently deft as the
conception is. Sharing a strategy cleverly deployed by Ann
Magnuson and Sandra Bernhard, Durang mounts a devastating
critique of junk culture (i.e., the likes of Siegfried &
Roy) by loving it to death.
7 Days, October 11, 1989
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