Music: Frank Simes
Writer: Lisa Verlo
Director: Elizabeth Kaye Sortun
Opening with a song and then turning into a biography, exposé and confessional, Hollwoodn’t is the tale of a would be starlet who got no closer to Hollywood fame than the bedroom of one of the leading actor directors of the late 80s.
The first few minutes are more like a conversation with the audience and an introduction to the show than the show itself as she sets up the background. It has more detail than is necessary and robs the story of some of the dramatic impact that would come from watching it develop as it happened. Calling on the voices of her heroines Marilyn Monroe and Katharine Hepburn also takes the early parts of the show down a side street as a device to introduce them as the angels on her shoulder and commentators on her life as the story proper begins.
Framed around a letter she has been instructed by them to write to the, at this point, anonymous director, writer and performer Lisa Verlo then intercuts songs and scenes from her early life with her experience in Hollywood and the beginning and middle of her affair with the man. Her mother’s puritanism is almost a direct cause of her sister’s promiscuity and her own early interest in sex, and leads on to a first boyfriend with a range of sexual fetishes that she accommodates but never really enjoys. This works to give extra context to why she is largely unquestioning about the directors motives and intentions when she begins sleeping with him.
There’s a humour in Verlo’s script and delivery that manages to overcome the lack of dramatic tension and turn this into more of ‘an audience with’ type of show than a play, but there’s also a feeling that it’s underplaying a lot of the issues she’s exploring, and the distractions of Monroe and Hepburn grow greater as the show progresses and they serve more to get in the way rather than support the story.
It isn’t until late on, when she names the actor director and introduces the idea of the gentleman predator, contrasting them with the likes of Harvey Weinstein and questioning whether the charm and ease they use for seduction and deception is actually worse than the unambiguous demands and assaults that are never wrapped up in lies and false promises, that the show really seems to come together and hint at what it could have been.
It’s a true story, and one that Verlo says she is planning to turn into a musical with her partner and musical director, Frank Simes. The potential of a musical with a full cast of characters and the story being told through the action rather than the first person narrative used here, is clear to see. The show at present feels more like the start of a process to develop this than a finished product in its own right.
Runs until August 27 2023 | Image: Contributed
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