The Village! A Disco Daydream

I felt very un-A List Gay when I entered the Soho Playhouse, but I was eventually won over by Nora Burns’s new show, The Village! A Disco Daydream (and that’s saying something for a curmudgeon like myself).

While I may be a little biased (she once lived in my building), Burns has been paying her dues for years in comedy troupes like Unitard, The Nellie Olesons and Planet Q and is finally getting the recognition she deserves (including a review in The New Yorker!).

And while I didn’t quite catch the end of the disco era in New York City (although I did own a copy of the album A Night at Studio 54) and I was decidedly more East Village than West Village, there were many moments of recognition for me (and history lessons for the kids).

The show tells the story of a hustler named Trade (Antony Cherrie) who lives in the West Village with his sugar daddy (Chuck Blasius) in 1979 and meets a young NYU student (Drew Timberlake Hill) and falls in love. Narrated by “trans-queen” Glace Chase, the show also features “gender fluid” Eileen Dover, a fag hag (Ashley Chavonne), a delivery man (Kevin Boseman) who embodies certain porn movie cliches, and three go-go dancers (Jack Barrow, Chris Patterson Rosso and JMV). (Burns certainly knows her gay stereotypes!) Burns herself appears as Junkie Jane, another character you might have met in the West Village in 1979. While she doesn’t have any lines in this show, she’s prominently featured in her other show, David’s Friend, which is being performed in repertory and which I saw in an earlier incarnation at La Mama.

The mood is set as soon as you enter the theater, to strains of disco music, while the go-go dancers mingle with the audience. While the set is black-box theater spare, for me one of the strong points of the show is its clever theatricality, such as when one actor holds up a widow frame to illustrate someone throwing their keys down to a friend through an apartment window.

The show then jumps forward to 1994 and touches on the devastation wrought by AIDS. The message here seems to be to live life to the fullest and enjoy it while you can.

The entire cast seems to be having a good time and I particularly enjoyed Cherrie who, in addition to being the requisite hunk (with a Ewan McGregor-ish Scottish accent, no less), has some touching moments at the end of the show. And since I sat in the first row, I got to enjoy his, er, “talents” up close. (Yes, I’m smitten.)

If I have any criticisms, they were minor (and, OK, maybe a little personal).

The sugar daddy character, who’s so “old” he has to pay for sex, was the same age I happened to turn the day I saw the show! (I guess people didn’t take very good care of themselves in 1979.)

And the audience on the night I saw the show was sometimes perhaps a little too enthusiastic, especially the man sitting next to me who laughed maybe a little too hard every time he spotted a reference. (This isn’t The Rocky Horror Picture Show!)

But perhaps that’s to be expected when people who are normally glued to their cell phones discover the joy of live theater, especially a production as fun and well-executed as this one.