Theatre: A Taste of Things to Come (York Theatre)/Homos, or Everyone in America (Labyrinth)"Whipped cream fixes everything," says one of the desperate housewives in A Taste of Things to Come, a show that could use a nice, big spritz of Reddi-Whip. This gals'-night-out entertainment woos its target audience with easy, familiar gags about eras past and peppy musical numbers -- never mind that it's all been said before, with far more wit and invention. The book, by Debra Barsha and Hollye Levin, is a bit of amateur sociology about the members of the Wednesday Winnetka Women's Cooking Club, a quartet of twentysomething ladies who meet weekly, plotting to win first place in the Betty Crocker Cooking Contest. In this endeavor, they're a little bit like the Cleveland Indians -- ever-hopeful yet drowning in consolation prizes. Still, they soldier on, buoyed by the chance to enjoy an afternoon of gossip, snacks, drinks, and the latest episode of Ted Mack's Amateur Hour. The ladies are Joan Smith, the poised and faintly mysterious hostess and narrator; Connie Olsen, who is very, very pregnant and plenty nervous about it, for good reason; Dottie O'Farrell, who is plump, prudish, and produces children with monotonous regularity; and Agnes Crookshank, the resident single girl and in-house rebel. The first act, set in 1957, rehashes all the usual points about the era's repressive mores. "You're twenty-three years old! Practically a spinster," Dottie admonishes Agnes. Dottie insists that she is ecstatically happy in her marriage, but her purse is a portable drugstore, filled with bottles of Miltown, Darvon, and the like. Connie laments that her husband, Thor, "hates my rump roast," but adds he is rather fond of knitting and figure skating, red flags that the ladies delicately choose to ignore. Joan presides over everything with endless good cheer. The show's title notwithstanding, the jokes have the distinct flavor of reheated leftovers. Connie lights up and has a couple of cocktails because, she says, Dr. Spock recommends it "to calm the nerves." The ladies moon over a Life magazine cover featuring Rock Hudson, a Winnetka native. "He and my older brother, Buck, were like this," says Dottie, entwining two fingers. A copy of the Kinsey Report is produced, to general shock; one of them holds the book sideways, as if ogling Mr. January in an issue of Playgirl. And the ladies reminisce about a strapping high school quarterback named Biff, leading to the following exchange: Joan: Agnes, did you boff Biff? Agnes: I plead the fifth. The most amusing bits refer to the oeuvre of Joe Bonomo, who once turned out dozens of purse-sized booklets instructing women how to be efficient household managers, gourmet cooks, and seductive sirens -- because, of course, the responsibility for marital success was entirely theirs. There is the occasional barbed comment on the era's culinary manners. ("Do we have fresh crab?" "It's in the cupboard.") The action is interrupted with riotous vintage television commercials, including one that suggests serving the wrong brand of coffee puts you in the fast lane to divorce court, and another in which the faces of female subjects are treated with radioactive dirt, in order to prove (via a Geiger counter!) just how much grime the average woman picks up while going about her business. The second act is set ten years later, when the ladies have fallen out of touch, and Joan, who has more than one secret to impart, convenes the Wednesday group for a last hurrah. I won't divulge too much except to note that their lives have been reshaped by biracial marriage, homosexuality, the pill, and careers, among other agents of change. Joan is now an advice columnist and Thor, Connie's figure-skating husband, is now a resident of West Hollywood. The times may be groovy but the jokes are still the kind that killed vaudeville: "You're Jewish?" "But you love bacon." "All Jews love bacon." The obligatory reefer is produced and Dottie, after one toke, gets a titanic case of the munchies and launches into a number called "Food." There's a moment -- a nanosecond, really -- when the conversation turns to Vietnam and Dottie announces that her oldest boy is in the military, and you think that A Taste of Things to Come is going to reach for something besides canned humor, but it quickly passes. The songs, also by Barsha and Levin, tend to sheathe rudimentary lyrics ("Ten years/The world's a different place/Ten Years/We've been to outer space") in uptempo melodies that go down easy. The most attractive number is "Blessings in Disguise," a thoughtful duet for Connie and Agnes that will be of interest to performers looking for something fresh for their cabaret acts. There's also an early '60s pop pastiche, "The Whomp," with a hook that will take you days to get out of your head. The ladies themselves are all winners, giving everything they have to material that doesn't always return the favor. Paige Faure is a genial emcee as Jane, confiding to us that each of the women, in turn, is her best friend, and presiding over some genuine shockers in the 1967 get-together. Janet Dacal supplies the necessary sass as Agnes, whether imagining herself as a superstar named Maria Magenta or taking her measure of life in Winnetka in a number titled "I'm Outta Here." As a bonus, with her hair combed back and dressed in an outrageous Pucci-style printed outfit, she looks eerily like the pre-eminent '60s figure Jacqueline Susann. Allison Guinn's knack for physical comedy is useful here, especially in a priceless moment with a beanbag chair; she also amuses when, allegedly on a diet, she pours the contents of large box of Good & Plenty into a smaller box, thus demonstrating her concept of portion control. Autumn Hurlbert has a refreshingly natural manner as Connie and, like the others, sings beautifully. This is the slickest production I've ever seen at the York. Steven C. Kemp's elaborate kitchen interior has a pure '50s color scheme and many Populuxe touches, backed by a collage of ads for the likes of Tide, Cremora, and shredded wheat. Nathan Scheuer's lighting is nicely low-key in the book scenes, then pulls into high gear during the numbers, with lots of color, chases, and other effects. Dana Burkart's costumes take a satirical view of fashions of two decades, but still takes care to make the ladies look good. Justin West's projections, of the-above mentioned commercials, are often comic high points. Given the use of electric instruments, the production's sound design is more present that usual, but Daniel J. Gerhard's design is loud, bright, and intelligible. There seems to be an endless market for this sort of celebration-of-female-friendship musical, so I suspect that A Taste of Things to Come will do very well in the resident and amateur theatre markets. But there's no getting around the fact that the taste it offers is remarkably bland. Agnes, referencing an iconic '50s product, says, "Sprinkle some Accent on it. It brings out the flavor in everything." Is there such a thing as Accent for musicals? ---------- In brief: I caught up with Homos, or Everyone in America, now in its last week at Labyrinth Theater Company. In structure remarkably like Tanya Barfield's Bright Half Life (seen last season at the Women's Project), Homos tracks a relationship in almost Cubist fashion, taking the key moments in a gay love affair, scrambling them, and presenting them to us in tantalizing fragments as we gradually figure out what happened to a pair of young men known only as The Academic and The Writer. Gradually, we see, in scenes ranging between 2006 and 2011, that what begins as a rapturous love affair is sorely tested by issues of fidelity, addiction, and a certain sense of competition when it comes to their professional lives. Both men are bright, funny, spiky, and possessed of independent turns of mind. They should be perfect for each other, but all sorts of problems set in, not least a devastating event (not to be revealed here) that marks a terrible milestone for them both. Michael Urie is The Writer, charming and self-involved in equal measure -- he bristles at being called a gay Woody Allen, but that's about right -- and surprisingly tough-minded when his interests are threatened. His reaction to The Academic's words of criticism regarding his short stories is especially telling, as is his passive-aggressive way of repeatedly introducing the topic of threesomes into the conversation. Robin De Jesús is The Academic, ostensibly the more overtly romantic of the two, possibly also the less stable, certainly the most vulnerable. Under the direction of Mike Donahue, both actors nail their roles, leaping from one emotional landscape to another with ease. Dane Laffrey's extremely spare set design lays out a ground plan with the audience on two sides. Because the playing area has a couple of angles built into it, the audience seating is placed in a rather odd configuration; no matter where you sit, you're going to be spending a fair amount of time craning your neck. I don't fully understand this approach, although it does provide for remarkable intimacy with the actors. Jessica Pabst's costumes, Scott Zielinski's lighting, and Daniel Kluger and Lee Kinney's sound are all solid. Homos, or Everyone in America is very much a play of this century, most amusingly in the way it tracks the evolution of social media from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook, but also in the many bright remarks about the likes of Joan Didion, Larry Kramer, and Anna Madrigal, the heroine of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City novels. During an argument, The Academic refers to The Writer as "her;" The Writer snappishly responds, "Don't do that. I'm not a woman and it's not 1968. Okay, this isn't Boys in the Band." The line gets a big laugh, but, in a sense, Homos is a contemporary update, in miniature, of Mart Crowley's classic, in the way that it takes the temper of the times. Years from now, if someone wants to know what it was like to be young, gay, and in love in the first years of the 21st century, Homos will offer a most revealing glimpse. -- David Barbour 
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