Entertainment :: Theatre
Willie Wanker & the Hershey Highwayby Kilian MelloyMonday Apr 27, 2009 If Willie Wanker & the Hershey Highway sounds like one of the more outrageous titles in the ouevre of Ryan Landry and the Gold Dust Orphans, the play itself--a wild, colorful riff, of course, on "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory"--represents a step forward for the troupe’s stagecraft skills.
Landry’s satirical opuses never fail to bite hard and elicit howls aplenty--of laughter, that is. He might be wringing fun from the Greek classics ("Eurydice") or offering a pop-culture Yuletide-themed mashup ("Silent Night of the Lambs," "All About Christmas Eve"), or finding a fiendishly fresh angle on Americana ("Whizzin’" runs away to demented new lands with "The Wizard of Oz" while "Of Mice and Mink" deconstructs and then reassembles Steinbeck according to Landry’s own peculiar sense of fun), but there’s always a more serious undercurrent present in the writing and the production of a Gold Dust Orphans play than the surface joviality.
In the case of "Willie Wanker," which is a musical, one notices right off how effective the songs are in explaining the large cast of characters. As with the Roal Dahl novel (and the two movie versions it spawned), "Willie Wanker" involves a reclusive chocolatier--Willie Wanker (Ryan Landry)--allowing a limited number of visitors into his long-off-limits factory, a wonderland where sweets and treats of all sorts originate. Wanker has left the selection of the lucky few up to chance, enclosing five golden tickets in the wrapping of five "Wanker" chocolate bars.
As the tickets are discovered one by one all around the globe, the lucky kids and their parents are given song-and-dance routines (some set to original music, some to old tunes) that sketch out who they are: the German Gloops, Augustus (Miss Kris) and his Nazi mother (Neil Graham); the rich and snobbish Salts, including spoiled daughter Veruca (Penny Champayne) and her parents (William York and Barbara Lee Ford); trash-talking bad girl Violet Beauregard (Liza Lott) and her fast-talking father (chris Loftus); and the Teevees, video game-obsessed Mike (Gene Dante, sometimes also played by Jonathan Popp) and his mother (Olive Another).
The dirt-poor Charlie Bucket (Megan Love) and his grandfather (Billy Hough) are, of course, the fifth and final winners; we’re been rooting for them all along because, true to the book, Charlie and his family live in Dickensian squalor (their house, we are told, is invisible because it would have been too expensive to construct it out of wood, placing the family manse somewhere south of the Monty Python skit in which various narrators relate their humble origins, only to one-upped... or one-downed... by the next guy: "We used to dream of living in an outhouse...").
By the time Landry strolls on, a perfect combination of Gene Wilder’s wild-haired portrayal in the original 1971 movie version and the calmly sadistic turn offered by a scarily Jacko-like Johnny Depp in the 2005 remake, it’s Act Two... and the Hershey Highway is open for visitors.
The titular highway is the path through Wanker’s factory, and along the way the naughty little children meet various grisly fates at the hands of Wanker’s helpers, the Oompa... excuse me, make that the Cocoa Cuties, a race of indigenous people made of chocolate who hail from faraway Peppermint Bay. (A backup-style trio of Cocoa Cuties strolls onstage from time to time, always done up in "Dream Girls" glamor, to offer their commentary in song. Truly, they are the most delicious part of the show.)
Will Charlie turn out to be the good little boy who wins the ultimate prize (and, er, doesn’t get devoured by a tiger or have his brain scooped out)? Or will he, too, succumb to the temptations offered along the Hershey Highway?
"Willie Wanker" is unending fun, going in for the comic kill at every turn. Newscasters (literal talking heads fashioned after the Muppets) goose the story along, while Scott Martino’s costumes rival Windsor Newton and Lady Tomb Raider’s cheap but colorful sets. Roger Moore’s sound design is outstanding, and Tom Yaz brings the show into the realm of multimedia with a brief, but hilarious, video.
Troupe member Afrodite (nominated along with former Orphan Foster Grant for an IRNE for the dance sequences in "All About Christmas Eve") creates more prize-worthy choreography; directors Larry Coen and James P. Byrne tie everything together into a coherent and fast-moving package that proves to be twice as fun as the 1971 movie with Gene Wilder (and, by simple application of algebra’s associative rule, two thousand times more fun than the Johnny Depp remake).
"Willie Wanker and the Hershey Highway" runs through May 24 at Machine, located in the basement of The Ramrod, at 1254-1256 Boylston Street in Boston.
Performance schedule: Friday and Saturday nights at 8:00; Sundays at 4:00 p.m.
Tickets available online at www.ovationtix.com/trs/cal/27405/
Kilian Melloy reviews media, conducts interviews, and writes commentary for EDGEBoston, where he also serves as Assistant Arts Editor.
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