Theatre in Review: Georgie: My Adventures with George Rose (The Loft at the Davenport Theatre)

	Ed Dixon. Photo: Carol Rosegg

If, as many people say, friendship is a gift, Ed Dixon's closeness to the actor George Rose was a distinctly mixed blessing -- one with long-lasting repercussions. He met Rose nearly half a century ago, and Rose died in 1988 -- yet here Dixon is, reliving it all as if it were yesterday, in a show that is part memorial and part exorcism. It's a classic story of a star befriending a young performer who is just starting out, a relationship that proves fruitful until its ghastly denouement. (If you were around when Rose died, you'll know what I mean. If not, hold on tight.) It is also loaded with classic theatre stories, calculated to leave Broadway fans chortling with glee; in fact, it's just about the funniest horror story around.

Dixon was twenty -- "I was young and pretty and could sing high" -- when he was cast in a Broadway-bound revival of The Student Prince, featuring the 50-ish Rose in the comic role of Lutz, valet to the title character. The young man was instantly fascinated by Rose's comic command, especially when he learned that the actor had written into the contract the right to use his own material, altering it as he went. (Dixon admits to standing in the wings nightly, waiting to see what Rose would come up with next.) Rose's gifts were never more apparent than when he left the production for a time and his replacement, Ray Walston, bombed nightly.

As Dixon gradually got to know Rose, his many eccentricities came to light. Rose's dresser was named Doug, but Rose called him "Lisette" and made him wear a French maid's apron. (This ritual was repeated through the years with whoever dressed him.) Standing on a street corner in Greenwich Village, chatting with Dixon, Rose's eye caught a cross-generational gay couple passing by, moving him to remark, "Well... you know, when a woman gets older she has to open her purse." And when Rose invited Dixon to tea at his Jane Street apartment, Dixon, to his horror, saw a mountain lion emerge from a bedroom. Rose, looking out from the kitchen, said, merrily, "Oh I see you two have met!" It was only then that Dixon noticed that Rose's hands and arms were covered with scratches and bites.

Rose is a stellar example of a certain kind of British gay star -- Noël Coward is the best example -- who, rather than languish in the closet, built a carapace of mannerisms that distracted audiences from his sexual identity even as it remained in plain sight. Dixon, a priceless storyteller and note-perfect mimic with Swiss-watch timing, regales us with some of Rose's pearliest tales of his co-stars. In addition to a savagely hilarious -- and unprintable -- comment about Rex Harrison, we hear about Gladys Cooper, unable to remember her lines but stoutly refusing to attend an extra rehearsal in the evening, because it would cut into her drinking time; Peter Ustinov, author and star of the flop comedy Beethoven's Tenth, spending hours relentlessly auditioning actresses for a maid's role ("He must have seen two thousand buxom blond trollops for the part," Rose grumbled. "The line outside Michael Bennett Studios must have looked like immigration in Stockholm."); and Ralph Richardson, giving the young Rose advice about applying makeup ("When you sit in your chair and you finish your paint, look in the mirror and ask yourself...Is it human?").

With material like this, it's no wonder Dixon fell under Rose's spell. He also closely studied Rose's onstage technique, which allows him to offer penetrating analyses of his performances as Alfred P. Doolittle in My Fair Lady and the Major General in The Pirates of Penzance. But, almost from the beginning, hints of something darker could be glimpsed. Of course, there were the animals. (The mountain lions met a grisly fate and were replaced by an ocelot.) But there was also the cruel streak that would surface unexpectedly -- when, for example, he terrified a young, inexperienced voice student of Dixon's with a startlingly elaborate and filthy joke. And there were the implications buried in a question he asked Dixon early on: "Do you like coffee-colored boys?"

That this wasn't just another camp remark became evident only years later, when Dixon joined Rose at his vacation home in the Dominican Republic. It was here that a stark light was cast on a previously veiled part of Rose's life, involving sex trafficking and pedophilia. The stunned Dixon fled to Santo Domingo, where he went on a days-long bender before getting on a flight back to the US. Before he could confront Rose, he was found dead, the apparent victim of a car accident that only later was discovered to be a cover for murder.

Dixon is candid about how his life spiraled down following these events -- accelerated by career reverses and the onset of the AIDS epidemic, which claimed some of his close friends. For all its show business hilarity, Georgie is at heart a tragedy, summed up in the question Dixon asks the audience: What would you do if you discovered that a beloved friend or relative repeatedly committed heinous acts? And how would you go forward with your life?

Dixon is a superb raconteur, winning us over with an opening gambit about his $70-a-month rent -- those were the days -- and never letting go until the finale, when, playing Alfred P. Doolittle himself, he finally makes some sort of accommodation with the past. He notes that Rose often had "the most startling glint in his eye," as if he and the world were in on a private joke, but he is more than a match for Rose in that department, especially when impersonating one of the twentieth-century theatre greats who populated Rose's anecdotes. I was particularly taken with his version of Katharine Hepburn, on the technique of acting: "You just say the lines and you get on with it. And then people either like you or they don't. I'm my case, they usually like me... more than I like them."

Eric Schaeffer, whose direction keeps the show moving at exactly the right pace, also designed the set, a haunted-looking old theatre with a broken proscenium (lined with clear lightbulbs), a series of rigging ropes, and many ghost lights. Chris Lee's lighting is sensitively attuned to the play's many mood shifts, although his extremely limited palette leaves one longing for a little splash of color.

Georgie will, inevitably, appeal most strongly to theatre fans with a deep sense of history, as well as those who saw Rose perform. (I saw him at least four times: coolly serving cocktails and understated wisecracks to Rex Harrison and Claudette Colbert in The Kingfisher and Aren't We All?; impersonating a Henry Kissinger-like figure in the notorious flop musical Dance a Little Closer; and authoritatively presiding over the audience-driven pandemonium of The Mystery of Edwin Drood.) That his mastery of his profession masked such darkness and chaos is terribly sad; Rose is lucky to have known Dixon, who now enshrines his friend's life, in all its light and shadow. -- David Barbour