When Pigs Fly
Arts on Real, through Jan. 28
Running time: 1 hr, 40 min
Who among us hasn’t known a Wicked Witch just like her, a stiff-necked, thin-lipped, narrow-eyed (not to mention narrow-minded), mirthless killjoy whose sole purpose in life seems to be squashing like a loathsome cockroach any sign of youthful creativity or frivolity or simple fun? We’ve all heard her drone on incessantly about life being a serious business with no place for foolishness and the sooner one learns that the better. We’ve seen her sneer at artistic pursuits and belittle any dreams of a life on the stage or in the studio. Maybe for you she was an aunt or a babysitter or a Sunday school teacher. For Howard Crabtree, she was a high school guidance counselor who stomped on his desire for a career in theatre by telling him he’d make it as a performer and costume designer when … well, you’ve seen the title of the show. And so Crabtree got his sweet revenge by developing this theatrical revue in which his personal Wicked Witch appears and gets her comeuppance.
As such, it’s no surprise that When Pigs Fly eventually made its way to Austin, a city full of refugees from little Texas towns (as well as a few big cities) where the hidebound and crabbed of spirit hold sway. This is a place where Crabtree and all the “dream Curlys” like him can go their own way, “dressed for excess.” And it should be no surprise that Arts on Real was the local theatre company to premiere the revue, as director/set designer/costume designer/lighting designer/theatre producing artistic director Blake Yelavich has gone his own way and founded a theatre that frequently celebrates the extravagant, the frivolous, the fun, and the gay. If there’s a surprise to the production, it’s that it’s, well, so modest. At the risk of sounding like a Wicked Witch, much of the show is built around the extravagant costumes that were Crabtree’s specialty and which turned the original production of this show into an off-Broadway sensation that ran for years. Crabtree appears as a character – embodied here winningly by Kirk Addison – and at a climactic point declares that the problem isn’t that he’s gone too far, it’s that he hasn’t gone far enough, leading into a fashion parade of outrageously over-the-top outfits. The costumes created by Yelavich and Ia Layadi are clever and amusing and ingeniously constructed, but outlandish? Hardly any more than what you might see at Eeyore’s or Carnaval or on Sixth Street at Halloween. Maybe that’s a hazard of staging this show in a city loaded with Lone Star Crabtrees; they’ve raised the bar on “dressed for excess.”
That’s not to say that the Austin production isn’t entertaining. But it feels more complete in the less elaborate numbers, where it’s just a performer interpreting the songs by composer Dick Gallagher and lyricist Mark Waldrop (with some additional lyrics added here by Addison) – say, Bryan Schneider boyishly crooning of his infatuation with the oft-married Liz Taylor; a tortured Doug Labelle torching it up three times over his unrequited loves for, respectively, Dubya, Warren Chisum, and Tom DeLay; and Addison sweetly celebrating an unconventional romance in the Sixties suburbs in “Sam and Me.” These numbers, like most of the material, are so featherlight that they’d blow away with a puff of breath, but unencumbered by the expectations of spectacle and lifted by simple, engaging performances and the accompaniment of musical director Steve Saugey, they’re when this When Pigs Fly really takes wing.
This article appears in January 13 • 2006.