I (heart) angina
Hilarious new play brings audiences to knees
Now that Cats and Miss Saigon have called it quits (huzzah!), there’s finally an opening in the Broadway market for young turks like myself. I’ve been scratching m’noodle for months, trying to come up w/ a surefire standing-room-only ideer that’ll finally put my name in lites. Admittedly, my initial concepts were baldfaced rip-jobs (Dogs, Mister Saigon). I next thought about rewriting West Side Story in iambic pentameter and moving the story from N.Y.C. to Italy, but that seemed like too much work. Then I thought I’d take a cue from The Lion King and adapt a beloved cartoon (not to be confused with "adopt a beloved baboon," which is precisely what I’ve been trying to do these past five years – damn our closeminded legal system!), like maybe Chicken Run.
I threw in the towel countless times, but always picked it up, folded it and set it back in the linen closet. (Tip: a pinch of pot-pourri will keep that towel smelling great no matter how much you chuck it around.) Then, one glorious a.m., I awoke to find a shiny dime beneath my pillow, and my front teeth missing. Oh! happy day, the muse had visited under cover of night!
I mean, yeah, the teeth were still in my head when I went to sleep, so it’s not like I’ll be eating an apple anytime soon, but it’s sweet relief nonetheless to be over my writer’s block. "Say, pal," I can hear you wondering aloud, "what is this big idea of yours, anyway?" Funny you should ask!
A man of the people, I take great pleasure conducting interviews w/ interesting people. One of my longstanding passions is talking to folks who’ve experienced deep, viselike pain beneath the breastbone (over the heart & stomach region), usually as a result of diseased coronary arteries. Once meticulously catalogued and indexed, I’ve never known what to do w/ my findings – until I wove 40 of these compelling testimonials into the most riveting two hours the theatre world has ever seen. Laddies & gentle-giants, I give you...The Angina Monologues.
The plan is to eventually bring in three-four-five celebrities to share the stage, but for the first year or so I’ll just have one actor perform The Angina Monologues in its entirety. In fact, I won’t be able to hire a stage manager and an actor, so they’ll hafta to be one & the same. Which is to say, it’ll hafta be me. (Unless that baboon adoption goes thru. Fingers crossed!)
No worries, ’cuz the material is that good. As an ice-breaker (a way to loosen up the audience and get ’em comfortable about their bodies), The Angina Monologues starts off with a deceptively simple question: "If your angina could talk, what would it say?" You won’t believe how startlingly diverse the answers are (esp. when you hear me deliver ’em using an awe-inspiring array of show-biz impersonations & stereotypical ethnic accents). Here’s just a sampling: "Hold still whilst I radiate down the inner side of yr left arm! Mama-mia!" (Italian-American), "So you like zee bacon, huh?" (Parisian French), "Yr diseased coronary arteries are narrowed by atherosclerosis, and as such are unable to deliver sufficient oxygen-laden blood to the heart muscle!" (Japanese-inflected English, and I do the whole bit so it looks/sounds like a poorly dubbed Godzilla movie, or Iron Chef), and "I am tricking you! Altho yer experiencing feelings of suffocation, there is no actual difficulty in breathing!" (Wm. Shatner).
I don’t want to give too much away, but I will say that the finale (a veritable symphony of angina-sufferin’ sounds – think the When Harry Met Sally deli scene, as performed by Redd Foxx) is a real showstopper. Yessir, The Angina Monologues is not to be missed.
Next week: I’ve already copyrighted Mister Saigon, so don’t even think about swiping it. |
