Theatre in Review: Cinderella (Theater XIV)

	Photo: Courtesy of Company XIV

Well, it's certainly not Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella. This is the current offering of Company XIV, a dance-theatre troupe that merges ballet technique with Cirque du Soleil-style acrobatic feats, all of it filtered through a Minsky's Burlesque sensibility. Cinderella's stepmother is a bombshell with a plunging décolletage; the stepsisters are men in drag; the handsome prince looks like he might be waiting for a prince of his own. The costumes -- consisting of garters, bustiers, spangles, and little else -- are sufficiently provocative that one wouldn't be surprised if, instead of a glass slipper, Cinderella, fleeing the ball at midnight, left behind a stray pasty.

Company XIV has been up to these tricks for some time, having won some good attention for a piece called Nutcracker Rouge. Cinderella was seen previously at the Minetta Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village, but the troupe has now set up a dedicated performance venue in Bushwick. It's a vast space with a wide stage, and in its appointments -- including a modified circular thrust stage lined with lightbulbs, Austrian curtains, low-hanging chandeliers, diffused lighting, and haze-filled atmosphere -- it looks vaguely like the setting of a sinister between-the-wars German film. If Marlene Dietrich, as Lola Lola, the femme fatale from The Blue Angel, had commandeered the stage to sensuously murmur the lyrics of "Falling in Love Again," I don't think anyone would have been surprised.

The cast members -- all of them rouged and covered with pancake and, to put it mildly, underdressed -- mingle with the audience; some make conversation while, near the men's room, a guy juggles pins. Some audience members sit at cabaret tables, others in theatre seats, fitted with little tables. Bar sales appear to be brisk, and I suspect that one reason for the show's unnecessary three-act structure is to move more craft cocktails and bottles of champagne. Perhaps as a tribute to the troupe's name, two seats in the center of the room are occupied by a man dressed in a 17th-century waistcoat and breeches -- not to mention a pound of makeup and the biggest false eyelashes you've ever seen -- and a similarly dressed attendant. (Charles Perrault, the man who dreamed up Cinderella, was contemporaneous with Louis XIV.)

I'm not a dance specialist, but the piece, staged by Austin McCormick, the company's artistic director, often seems designed to end each scene with as many dancers as possible clustered together. (It looks like choreography devised using a Twister mat.) The scene in which the prince arrives with the slipper, ready to try it on any available young lady (or, in this version, man), climaxes in a kind of human centipede, with feet sticking out in every direction. Not that the prince can't be diverted from his mission: One of the main innovations is that, before he and Cinderella are reunited, he has a steamy romp, in a giant champagne glass, with her stepmother.

There are some amusing touches throughout, including the appearance of the stepsisters inside a giant skeletal pannier, a curtain half-raised to reveal the lower legs of those hoping to win the prince, a pole dance for Cinderella, and a fairly lively can-can. Overall, however, the atmosphere of calculated naughtiness becomes rather wearying, and the quality of the choreography isn't high enough to keep one engaged for the two-hour running time.

Among the performers, Lilin Lace (the stepmother), Nolan McKew (the prince), and Allison Ulrich (Cinderella) are thoroughly professional, if not terribly memorable. Far more amusing are Nicholas and Ross Katen, lending a strongly comic profile to the stepsisters, and Storm Marrero as the plus-size, blues-shouting fairy godmother. In addition to designing the scenery, Zane Philstrom created the costumes, which, in addition to the details described above, are long on G-strings, jockstraps, and other fetishistic details. The lighting, by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, is positively eccentric, focusing as it does on upstage washes and sidelighting effects that often obscure the performers' faces and bodies. Nobody is credited with sound design, which is puzzling, since the production makes extensive use of recorded music, ranging from baroque orchestral pieces to Offenbach, big-band numbers, and other selections.

It would be easy to say that Cinderella is aimed at millennials who want to feel they are whooping it up in Weimar Berlin. It mostly reminded me of Peep Show, a burlesque extravaganza staged by Jerry Mitchell a few years back in Las Vegas; then again, Peep Show was more cleverly staged. Still, there's something oddly wholesome about the strenuously decadent atmosphere. In one sequence, the Katen brothers are stripped of their jockstraps and run about, coyly covering their groins with their hands. Do they really think we can't handle the sight of what they're covering up? -- David Barbour