Theatre in Review: Tail! Spin! (Lynn Redgrave Theater at Culture Project)

	Rachel Dratch, Sean Dugan, Arnie Burton. Photo Carol Rosegg

Who doesn't love a juicy political sex scandal? That's the theory behind Tail! Spin!, which revisits four of the squirrelier episodes involving elected officials of recent years. Lest you think that these hypocritical blowhards have been sufficiently raked over the coals by the likes of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, Tail! Spin! offers a tasty premise: Every word in Mario Correa's text is taken from the public record, as well as from the tweets, emails, and Facebook posts that landed them in hot water in the first place. Certainly Larry Craig, Mark Foley, Mark Sanford, and Anthony Weiner make a nice, fat row of sitting ducks. And the hang-'em-with-their-own-words approach conjures up fond memories of Celebrity Autobiography, which shares with Tail! Spin! the presence of the elfin troublemaker Rachel Dratch.

And, while the show certainly has its lively moments of satirical schadenfreude, the targets -- even those who really had it coming, given their careers as professional moral scolds -- often come off as desperate, even pathetic. I wouldn't say I left the theatre sympathizing with them, but more than once I found myself wishing that fresher targets had been found.

This is certainly true of the sequence focusing on Craig, he of the "wide stance," which failed to explain away his overtures to a vice cop in a Minneapolis airport bathroom. There is fun to be had in the spectacle of Craig singing, "Alito, I just met a judge named Alito" to Leonard Bernstein's melody for "Maria," as well as his tortured defense of the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment. But Craig's firm insistence, in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary, that he is heterosexual, comes across as borderline tragic, especially if you've read the speculation that, as a young man, he was permanently frightened into the closet by the gay witch hunt that gripped his hometown, Boise, Idaho, in 1955, when he was a young man. Sean Dugan is a fine character actor, but he's not really the kind of comic who might find a satirical attack to make this shaky material work. (Interestingly, the show's press representative issued an opening night release noting that, only a couple of days earlier, Craig was fined for using campaign funds to pay for his defense.)

Equally dicey is the passage focusing on Mark Foley, who made himself infamous for salaciously texting Senate pages. It's pretty funny to see Foley interviewed by a nonplussed Sean Hannity, who wonders how Foley could be trading messages about penis sizes and masturbation with underage males while simultaneously serving as chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus. But watching him exchange texts with a teenager is more queasy-making than amusing, and there's something sad about how he paraded a German beauty queen as his beard while keeping his lover of two decades, a prominent plastic surgeon, on the QT. It's almost heartbreaking when you learn that, following Foley's fall from politics, the lover died young. As Foley, the fine funnyman Arnie Burton does his best with material that is uncertain at best.

The show fares better with Anthony Weiner, for fewer politicians have so resolutely worn a metaphorical "kick me" sign affixed to their backs for so long. Nate Smith nails Weiner's manic intensity, endless self-regard, and insatiable need to flirt. His exchanges with the "featured dancer" (stripper to you) Ginger Lee and the "progressive activist" Sydney Leathers are good, dirty fun. But the sketch trails off once Huma Abedin, Weiner's egregiously wronged wife, gets involved. And how can it be that there isn't one joke about "Carlos Danger," Weiner's nom de porn?

There are no such worries about the climactic (you should pardon the expression) sequence, because Mark Sanford remains as ripe for the plucking as ever. Titanically self-absorbed, convinced that he is the real victim -- even after betraying and humiliating his wife and dumping his mistress on Facebook without warning -- he is also a world-class bloviator, and his bizarre betrayal of his wife, skipping off to another continent while pretending to the world that he was hiking the Appalachian Trial, remains real-life political farce at its best. This is especially so when we see him shamelessly retailing his wife and four children as exemplars of the Christian family, all in the name of hustling a few votes. Tom Galantich is especially good at capturing Sanford's relentless oversharing and penchant for teary episodes in front of the press. (Now that he's back in Congress, the combination of him and John Boehner must have sent the Capitol's Kleenex budget skyrocketing.)

These scenes also benefit from Dratch's nifty double act as a dry-eyed Jenny Sanford, ever ready to catch her husband in another lie, and as a stunned Barbara Walters, trying to process the news that, before their wedding, Sanford asked his wife-to-be to remove the part about fidelity from their vows. Ironically, in a show about erring males, Dratch is the production's most consistent source of amusement. She is especially riotous as the angel-of-vengeance feminist lawyer Gloria Allred, and she scores as the hapless Maria Belén Chapur, Sanford's alleged "soulmate," who nevertheless had to learn from the press that her engagement was over.

Dan Knechtges' direction keeps things moving at a lightning pace, making sure that before we have too much time to be disappointed by a gag we are already in the middle of another. He has also overseen an amusing production design. Caite Hevner Kemp's set is a wicked spoof of those presidential debate sets that turn up on the networks every four years, complete with the projections of waving flags. Similarly, John Emmett O'Brien's sound design gives us plenty of patriotic marches and a full vocabulary of sounds signaling tweets, Facebook posts, and instant messages. Jennifer Caprio dresses everyone in appropriate business suits. Ryan O'Gara's lighting helps pace the action by shifting our attention from one miscreant to another.

It seems likely that the target audience for Tail! Spin! will get their fill of comic revenge, but somehow I expected more. Maybe I've heard these stories too many times. Maybe there is a tipping point where amusement turns into dismay. How is it that politicians on both sides of the aisle are so convinced that in this digital age they can still deceive their loved ones, not to mention the voters, without getting caught. Are all our elected officials sociopaths? At the top of the show, as the cast enters, a projection reads, "Meet Your Elected Leaders." More than once in Tail! Spin! you might wonder who exactly is the real butt of the joke.--David Barbour