Once Theatre DEREVO Shouson Theatre Arts Centre February 24 It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world, as the old movie title has it.
A pretty waitress stands in the street. Two bored angels wring out a cloud and hit her with a downpour. You just know it's going to be a bad day.
But wait! A hooked-nose janitor, handsome as Fagin, sweeps on - literally - and tries to sweep the waitress off her feet. She sits at a table, dreaming of her ship coming in . . . and in a picture-frame, sailors' heads bob up. Fagin's love is pure, his mime the perfect vehicle for uncomplicated affection: a rose whipped out, a beady eye cocked.
She's his! But wait! Here comes a slim, sly cad in morning suit and Bela Lugosi facepaint, and - women, huh? - the fickle filly's head turns in a mute wiggle of tush and a bat of eyelashes. A neurotic Cupid stumbles on and regrets he can't shoot straight as his bow and arrow collapse into a matchwood heap.
Fagin, frustrated love-fool, won't give up, and there follows a Buster Keaton-meets-Benny Hill romp through mean streets to meaner dungeons, where Lugosi keeps the girl. Fagin catches a falling star and rides it - to the tune of Deep Purple's Highway Star - before a traffic cop ('driving' a plank with two revolving lamps) pulls him over. Fagin escapes and produces a genie with a scimitar; but the surreal, comic-strip violence takes another twist as Lugosi hits back with the help of a roaring, mechanical beast and a greasy slob of an anti-superhero with a beer belly.
We're way over the rainbow in Wizard of Oz land, and a grimmer reaper than usual - a mental monk looking like Bond villain Robert Carlyle on a really nasty day - sees Fagin off.
