Smirking at ‘The Sound Of Music'
When "The Sound of Music" debuted on Broadway in 1959, it was a paradigm of Mittel-Europe meets the Great White Way schmaltz, as well as true musical comedy/operetta sentiment. Transferred to the big screen six years later, "The Sound of Music" was diminished in part by being overblown. Overblown properties — particularly those as over-familiar as this one — invite puncturing. And that's where Doug Elkins comes in. At Joe's Pub over the weekend, Mr. Elkins's "Fraulein Maria," performed to selections from the soundtrack of "The Sound of Music," sung mostly by Julie Andrews, was funny in part because I wanted so much to laugh.
In the hour-long "Fraulein Maria" Mr. Elkins gave the soundtrack selections a working over. He didn't directly laugh at or with them, but responded to them with an accompaniment of contrarian or irreverent images and incidents. The snow-capped squeakycleanliness of "The Sound of Music" here became a provocation to raunchiness. The muted or repressed sexuality inevitably connoted by the sisterhood of nuns from which Ms. Andrews's Maria breaks loose found its perfect parodied response in the opening overture with Arthur Aviles, a bald man in nun's drag. "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" received a comeuppance at the hands of David Parker, also in drag, who was seduced by brawny Archie Burnett. A popping tape measure here became an enthusiastic erection.
The patrons' tables became an extension of the performance space during "I Have Confidence," in which Jen Nugent and Nicole Wolcott inched along the railing of the balcony, then were lifted onto the stage by Mr. Burnett. Ms. Wolcott aggressively proclaimed herself a can-do world-beater, while Ms. Nugent hit the bottle.
"Fraulein Maria" was choreographed in collaboration with the performers, but Mr. Elkins' imprint is visible at all times. He has long explored and adopted demotic dance styles, and here Mr. Elkins himself, dressed in a wimple under a sweatshirt, performed a solo to "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" that distilled his signature "popping" ripples borrowed from street dance. He also danced a demented adagio with Keely Garfied to "The Sound of Music" which found her stepping into his cupped hands as if they were stirrups.
The combination of break dance bravado and classic modern dance that Mr. Elkins has brokered registered as a unique commodity. Hilarity remained the primary goal at all times, and it was instructive to see the way he added an extra accent here, an extra undulation there, thus parsing staples of modern dance movement so that they became unexpectedly absurd.
"Fraulein Maria" had no intermission, but Mr. Elkins's treatment of "Do Re Mei" corresponded to a socko Act I curtain number. A team of six dancers lobbed a compendium of dance styles and mischievous pantomime that changed with every phrase of the lyric. It went on and on, becoming more exuberant, more expansive in its references and momentum, and after seeing it one believed that Mr. Elkins was himself ready for a choreographic spotlight on Broadway or Hollywood.
Joe's Pub became something of a clubhouse during "Fraulein Maria" due to the coziness of the setting, the virtual winks exchanged between performers and audience, and the involvement of dancers who are favorites of the downtown scene, including Carolyn Cryer, Krista Jansen, Alexis Murphy, Charemaine Seet, Johnnie Moore and Mark Gindick. The performers hurtled intrepidly into everything they did, moving with more abandon than one would have imagined was possible on the confines of the vest pocket stage. Indeed, the size of the stage was itself ridiculed from the get-go, when Mr. Aviles danced with Ms. Nugent. At one point, their supported lifts found them squashed against the wall. Sets and accoutrements, such as potted miniature pine trees to signify the Alps, were ludicrously metanymic and miniaturized.
Mr. Elkins's irreverent margin notes scribbled over the score of "Sound of Music," served to deconstruct, but also bowed to the highly accomplished formulas of the original, which, in the end, proved as tough and durable as tungsten.
