Theatre in Review: The Legend of Georgia McBride (MCC Theater/Lucille Lortel Theatre)

	Dave Thomas Brown, Matt McGrath, Keith Nobbs. Photo: Joan Marcus

Just when you thought the theatre had squeezed every last drop of amusement out of the overwrought ways of drag queens, here comes The Legend of Georgia McBride to deliver an unexpectedly fresh twist on an old formula. Playwright Matthew Lopez invents a young, earnest, and 100% heterosexual young fellow named Casey, whose career as an Elvis impersonator is totally on the skids, plops him down in a tacky Florida gay bar ruled by a couple of imperious drag divas, then lets the fur fly. Before long, the hapless Casey has been reborn as the title character, racking up the big bucks with a new sassy, strutting, onstage persona.

Casey is the featured performer at Cleo's, a dump in Panama City, Florida, where his Elvis routine is attracting audiences in the mid-single figures. Meanwhile, he can't make the rent on the apartment he shares with his winsome, hard-working wife, Jo. Ratcheting up the financial pressure on him, Jo announces she is pregnant. Casey, whose grip on reality is never too tight, is thrilled; the more realistic Jo is panicky. He ebulliently announces that they will be "the best parents since Joseph and Mary." "Yeah, but then their kid died," Jo notes, in her signature slow drawl.

Casey's situation becomes even more desperate when he learns that Cleo's is to be made over into a gay bar, with the entertainment provided by Tracy Mills, a grand-manner drag queen of the old school, and her associate, an acid-tongued bundle of nerves named Miss Anorexia Nervosa. Rexy, as she is known, is as hard as the enamel on her fingernails; eyeballing the backstage accommodations at Cleo's, she snaps, "Bitch, Anne Frank wouldda have said 'no thank you' to this place." When her massive vodka intake leaves Rexy unable to perform, Casey is drafted as a replacement. And thus a good old boy from the Florida panhandle finds himself on stage, in a terrible wig and a little black dress, trying to fake his way through Edith Piaf's rendition of "Padam Padam." Did I mention he doesn't know a word of French?

The performance is less than a triumph, but Casey gets through it; even better, he improves with each subsequent appearance. And, under Tracy's tutelage, he finds a character of his own, lip-synching his way through the country music canon in the guise of a high-stepping seductress à la Shania Twain. Suddenly Casey, aka Georgia McBride, is enjoying an undreamed-of level of success. There's just one little problem: Jo thinks he is working as a bartender, and all that money he brings home consists of tips from serving up cocktails.

In truth, this little kernel of conflict is all that The Legend of Georgia McBride has to offer in the way of drama. It does, however, lead to a couple of surprisingly astringent confrontations: In one, Casey is forced to admit to Tracy, who treats him like a son, that he has kept his secret for fear of being termed "a fag." In another, Rexy explains, in no uncertain terms, that some people have no choice about being drag queens, and, furthermore, drag is more than a performance style: It's an attitude, a political choice, a heritage, and a brazen defiance of the status quo. But these are mere bumps in the road on the way to the smoothly engineered fairy-tale ending, in which everyone finds happiness and a surrogate family at Cleo's.

Otherwise, The Legend of Georgia McBride, snappily directed by Mike Donahue, is best enjoyed for its colorful characters, wisecracking dialogue, and authentically fabulous drag performances, especially the disco-tastic finale staged by Paul McGill. As Casey/Georgia, Dave Thomas Brown plays with a wide-eyed sincerity that convinces us that he could embrace a career of spangles and feathers while remaining a devoted husband and father. (Watching him find his diva self on stage is uncannily like seeing Louise learning to tame an audience in Gypsy, and almost as entertaining.) Even when forced to face his own fears and hypocrisies, he remains a charmer. Even better is Matt McGrath's head-snapping turn as Tracy: Whether vamping through an old Eartha Kitt ditty in a glittery pink sheath and matching wig, offering up worldly wisdom ("You've got to wake up pretty early in the afternoon to surprise a drag queen"), or proudly displaying the used fog machine she purchased on Ebay to class up the act ("Only used once, at a Ted Cruz fundraiser''), McGrath delivers one of the season's choice comic performances. (There's a great inside joke in Tracy's Broadway medley, when she does a bit of "What I Did for Love," as sung by Priscilla Lopez, Matthew Lopez's Tony Award-winning aunt.) The actor is also careful to give Tracy a completely different manner when out of drag, hinting at a far more complicated person underneath the sequins.

There are also nice contributions from Afton Williamson, who brings enormous likability to the fairly thankless role of Jo, and Wayne Duvall as Eddie, owner of Cleo's as well as its reluctant emcee. Keith Nobbs demonstrates his range in a pair of roles, as Casey and Jo's boozy, talkative male landlord and as Rexy, who is never more than a heartbeat away from a hair-pulling match with anyone who gets in her way. (Told that she can't appear on stage drunk and wearing roller skates, she snarls, "If Piaf could do it, so can I.")

Donahue has also seen to it that The Legend of Georgia McBride has a lively, amusing production design. Donyale Werle's unit set switches neatly between Casey and Jo's apartment and Cleo's, with sparkly drop-down curtains for some of the on-stage numbers. Ben Stanton's lighting is totally restrained when necessary but ready with saturated color washes and big sweeps when a touch of fabulousness is needed. Anita Yavich's costumes consist of a full line of ultra-glamorous drag wear, with a major assist from the makeup and wigs designed by Jason Hayes. (I particularly liked a shiny black and silver gown for McGrath, complete with a pointed metal headdress; it makes him look rather liked the cracked showgirl on the original poster for the musical Follies.) Jill BC Du Boff's sound design provides solid reinforcement for a hit parade of tunes from Broadway and Nashville.

This production also adds to Matthew Lopez's increasingly hard-to-pin-down artistic profile. It's hard to believe that this rowdy farce comes from the author of the postbellum drama The Whipping Man or the 9/11-themed one-act The Sentinels. Next to them, Georgia McBride may seem surprisingly frivolous, but the author's assured handling of this oddball situation and characters is not to be dismissed. Clearly, we're still learning what he is capable of. In any case, MCC has a real crowd-pleaser on its hands. -- David Barbour