Camille Tibaldeo as cross-addicted NYC cable TV personality, Selma Russo and Don Arrington as Miss Denial.
Don Arrington’s new musical revue If This Ain’t It is a good-natured, well-meaning, if irreverent, mess of a show. Free-wheeling is the kindest description of this collection of scenes set in the East Village. Chaotic is perhaps a better description.
But, despite an overwhelming shoddiness, the overall effect is one of earnest, skilled performers delivering humorously scathing vignettes about the poverty-stricken, abused and neglected people occupying one of the poorer sections of New York City.
Hosted by drag artist Michael Lynch in the guise of a sassy Lady Liberty (complete with a Starbuck’s cup as his torch), If This Ain’t It is set in the grimy, graffiti coated streets of the East Village where the homeless complain about getting fewer bucks and tenants live in rat-infested tenements. Don Arrington, who wrote If This Ain’t It, first appears as the director of a theater group which has just been tossed out of its space by a greedy landlord. He tells the audience that he is in such a desperate frenzy that he couldn’t even supply program notes. Camille Tibaldeo then makes the first of many appearances in a cardboard television set as the talk show host Selma Russo supplying gossipy stories in a grating voice and a cheap curly wig as a downtown version of Entertainment Tonight.
A naive young lady sings about being in love with a waiter at a local restaurant, totally blind to the fact that he is gay. A rich lady looks down her nose at the hoi polloi, but winds up in jail as a Madoff-like financial criminal. The homeless sing an ode to living in a cardboard box and children are abused by drug-addled caretakers.
In the midst of all the darkness there are glimmers of humanity in a song about how a series of strange coincidences lead to unintended generosity and kindness. There is even a wistful evocation of John Lennon’s “Imagine” in which the cast envisions a better world.
Along the way, this profanity-laced diversion is accompanied by a terrific five-piece band led by Rick Cutler, playing music that ranges in style from blues to hip-hop to pop. There is even a Country-Western ditty sung by a tourist from Texas who ogles the locals. The singing, particularly by the two leads, was expressive if not particularly smooth.
Behind the action a series of slides showed street scenes, parks, apartment interiors and restaurants, helping to create mood and the ragged ambience of the East Village.
If This Ain’t It lacks professional polish. It is a rude, crude rabble of a show that tries the patience of its audience with its agit-prop blatancy. However, underneath the roughness and the theatrical anarchy beats a sweet and well-meaning heart, offensive and sweet in equal measures. The message is communicated by an eclectic cast of eccentrics who give their all to Mr. Arrington’s labor of love.
IF THIS AIN’T IT
By Don Arrington
Theater for the New City
155 First Ave. at 10th St.
New York, NY
January 7th – 24th, 2010
Tickets: 212-254-1109 or http://www.theaterforthenewcity.net