Theatre in Review: That Golden Girls Show! A Puppet Parody (DR2 Theatre)

	Emmanuelle Zeesman. Photo: Russ Rowland

Some shows would seem to be beyond criticism; surely this show's title tells you all need to know, right? It certainly leaves one in little doubt about what to expect on arrival at the DR2, and, to be fair, you get what is promised: a rehash of the beloved '80s sitcom about four middle-aged-to-elderly ladies living in Miami, with the characters rendered as puppets. Jonathan Rockefeller's script is essentially a 90-minute Golden Girls episode, with all the characters present and accounted for: brittle, sarcastic Dorothy; lusty, Southern-belle Blanche; airheaded Rose; and Sophia, she of the take-no-prisoners wisecracks. All the expected elements are in place, as well: the sinister references to Shady Pines, Sophia's former residence; Rose's impossibly convoluted stories about life in her hometown of St. Olaf, Minnesota; allusions to Blanche's string of one-night stands; Dorothy and Sophia's mother-daughter squabbles; the cheesecake klatches in the kitchen, where everybody hashes out their problems; and, of course, the group hug that ended many episodes.

All that's missing are the laughs. The Golden Girls, which, admittedly, had a novel premise for the era, quickly settled into a groove, essentially repeating the same gags week after week for all seven seasons. Yet, thanks to a cast of four actresses blessed with crack comic timing and a team of writers, led by Susan Harris, who knew exactly how to tailor their material to their stars, the results were pretty steadily uproarious. (I could do an entire piece about Bea Arthur alone, how she could bring down the house with a pause and quarter-turn of her head, but when it came to comedy all four ladies were truly golden.) But it was the sum total of its elements that made The Golden Girls glitter; when, following Arthur's departure, an attempt was made at extending the franchise with a spin-off, The Golden Palace, it lasted one season.

What is on offer here is a quartet of puppets, created by Joel Gennari in a style that recalls the Muppets or perhaps the characters of Avenue Q, manipulated and voiced by a quartet of young puppeteers. Emmanuelle Zeesman (Sophia), Cat Greenfield (Blanche), and Arlee Chadwick (Rose) provide fair imitations of their predecessors' personalities; one of the bigger laughs at the performance was the first appearance of Weston Chandler Long (who alternates with Michael LaMasa) as Dorothy; only a man could adequately reproduce the foghorn bellow of her voice. All four deliver the personas created by the original actresses, but they simply aren't Bea Arthur, Estelle Getty, Rue McClanahan, and Betty White, all of whom could turn the limpest gag into a zinger.

Then again, the writing here is so weak that one wonders if even these four great ladies might not have found themselves at a loss. The labored plot involves Dorothy's feckless ex-husband, Stan (an at-sea Zach Kononov) who needs to marry in order to land an inheritance, thus setting off a rush to the altar by all four ladies. The plots were never the thing on The Golden Girls, but Rockefeller's script is a procession of flatlined one-liners about stretch marks and sex toys, along with such '80s ephemera as Magnum, PI; boom boxes; Mohawk haircuts; Sean Young; Sonny Bono; Burt Reynolds; and I Can't Believe It's Not Butter. Sophia snipes that Dorothy hasn't had sex since the Nixon Administration. Rose blathers on about the St. Olaf Herring Circus. Blanche announces she is getting plastic surgery; Sophia responds, "Make sure you don't get a boob attached to your forehead." Later, Blanche says, "I'm as jumpy as a virgin at a prison rodeo." She also appears in a light-up negligee, fitted out with LEDs. Even an audience of hard-core Golden Girls fans -- the three guys in line ahead of me had driven up from D.C. just to see the show -- found surprisingly little to laugh at.

For the record, David Goldstein's set, depicting the ladies' living room and kitchen, is faithful to the original, although his lighting of the kitchen scenes is surprisingly harsh. Nate Edmondson's compositions sound exactly like the sitcom's incidental music, and his sound design is totally solid.

That Golden Girls Show! tries to earn parody status with a series of self-conscious jests. "Attention: girls, gays, and grannies," comes the pre-show announcement, which tags the sitcom's main demographic groups. Sophia makes frequent references to the audience. And at one point, someone says, "No one over the age of ten has any interest in puppets." I'm sorry to say that, at the DR2 these days, that's probably true. -- David Barbour