You’ll have to wait until next year for Fifty Shades of Grey the movie to come out, but from now until April 13 you can see 50 Shades! The Musical at the Bluma Appel Theatre. This bawdy touring show pokes fun at both the content and the phenomenon of the book it parodies. Dubbed “mommy porn,” E.L. James’ erotic fan-fiction spinoff of Twilight (which Salman Rushdie said “makes Twilight look like War and Peace”) went on to outsell Harry Potter in the U.K. The musical, unaffiliated with James, does not take itself too seriously.
I cannot say that 50 Shades works on many levels; it works on one. It’s “approximately 69 minutes” of sex jokes, mostly sung and sometimes acted out. Appropriately enough, this musical is thoroughly self-indulgent. It’s as subtle and genteel as South Park. Cast members lasciviously lash their tongues at each other like they are impersonating Miley Cyrus. The “holding the note too long” gag gets old fast, but the tunes (all original) and the singing are consistently good. The onstage three-piece band, under the musical direction of keyboardist Riley Thomas, supports the energy of the relentlessly over-the-top acting.
The humour, characters and acting are similar to what you see on a particularly good episode of Saturday Night Live. The blatant omission of realism and character nuance is surely not an oversight by co-writer and touring director Emily Dorezas but a matter of remaining true to the source material. (I admit I’ve read only a few passages in the book, but you don’t have to eat an entire sheep to decide whether you like lamb.) To get the show, you don’t need to have read the novel, but it would help to have a general sense of what the book is all about.
In the show, three housewives—the demographic that consumed Fifty Shades of Grey like a house on fire—have chosen to read the novel for their book club. The action alternates between the women talking and singing about the book (Shiela O’Connor grows on you as the sweetly hesitant divorcée Carol) and the ridiculous novel characters recreating scenes from the book.
The novel’s heroine, 21-year-old Ana, played with gleeful abandon by Eileen Patterson, is not just naïve; she is more extra-virgin than a bottle of olive oil. In playing Ana’s friend Katharine, actress Kim David is channeling Amy Poehler, making the character crude and funnier than she probably is in the book. Jack Boice gets constant laughs as the insanely rich, arrogant and sexually non-standard Christian Grey. He wants Ana to enter into a BDSM contract with him, which would make her his sex slave, dictate what she is to eat and forbid her to touch him. It’s all just so Rodgers and Hammerstein.
The laughs are all cheap, but they are there. The audience, mostly women, cheered like it was their high school musical. My female companion called the show “the opposite of sexy, but a lot of fun,” and she still has no intention of reading the book. 50 Shades! The Musical doesn’t pretend to have a single shade of sophistication. Although it doesn’t go deep, it succeeds as the guilty pleasure it sets out to be and it does end with a satisfying climax. If you’re tempted to get some tickets, get on it; 50 Shades won’t be performing long, and who knows if it will come again. Ahem.
50 Shades: The Musical runs until April 13. For tickets and information go to www.50shadesthemusical.com.
