by Joe Miller
I’m writing these words from the train, somewhere in between Philadelphia and D.C.
We’re on our way home from a vacation in New York City. It’s my first visit back in a couple of years and my longest visit since we moved away in 2015.
It’s easy to forget just how big NYC really is. Just for a bit of context, the hotel where we stayed has more guest rooms (539) than there are households in Marlinton (about 500). Every street was swarming with people, many decked out in soccer jerseys, in town to root on their home countries at the World Cup games being held just across the river in New Jersey.
New York is a great sports town, and we did catch a World Cup game from an Irish sports bar that was significantly less crowded than the two others right beside it despite serving identical food and drinks in near identical décor.
But we were mostly in New York to take in the arts and the food. We spent a lot of time in bookstores, drank way too much coffee and had dinner at various vegan and Indian restaurants.
We planned the trip specifically for summer so that I could catch the Marcel Duchamp retrospective at MoMA (the Museum of Modern Art).
The exhibition is the first U.S. retrospective of Du-champ’s work since 1973.
Duchamp is the philosopher’s artist. His entire career is more-or-less a series of answers to the question “what is art,” or, as Du-champ himself famously asks, “Can one make works that are not ‘of art’?”
Duchamp is perhaps best remembered today for answering that question with what he called “readymades,” which were typically common items that he would sign and hang in a gallery. The most (in)famous of these is one he titled “Fountain,” a urinal turned on its side and signed “R. Mutt.”
Duchamp’s challenge to create works that are not “of art” inspired a century of conceptual art, a movement that holds that the idea behind a piece of art is more important than the physical object itself.
A hypothetical time traveler to the 1973 Duchamp retrospective might also have caught Tim Curry live in the original Broadway run of “The Rocky Horror Show.”
We had to make do with the latest revival, which features Luke Evans in the role of Dr. Frank-N-Furter. I was familiar with Evans from his roles in “The Hobbit” and in the “Fast and Furious” franchise. I had a lot of trouble picturing him in perhaps the pinnacle of campy roles.
And, honestly, it didn’t really work for me.
Evans certainly has the voice – he began his career on London’s West End, and he is clearly as comfortable on the stage as he is in front of a camera. Evans fully captures the rage-transitioning-to-heartbreak when Rocky – the perfect man Frank-N-Furter has created to be his partner – spurns Frank for Janet.
Evans is too ruggedly masculine for the role, a fact perhaps exacerbated by his decision to retain his trademark mustache.
Evans has said that he avoided rewatching Curry in the iconic role, so as to be able to offer his own interpretation. It all just felt a little forced to me, like I was watching an Actor Doing Actorly Things, all of which were just a bit too obvious to let me fully suspend disbelief.
Perhaps part of the issue is that “The Rocky Horror Show” is far less trans(ha!)gressive now than it was in 1973. Gender flipping is hardly new to theater – it’s the entire plot of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” – but “Rocky Horror” helped normalize it for modern audiences.
Gender flipping roles is such a common practice these days that – aside from a few loud weirdos on the Internet – most people simply take it in stride. “Operation Mincemeat” puts that new normal on full display.
The show’s five-person cast collectively play 80 different roles across the show’s 2.5 hour running time. Three of the five primary characters – Ewan Montagu, Hester Leggett and Johnny Bevin – are played by actors of the opposite gender.
“Operation Mincemeat” is loosely (and I mean very loosely) based on the British WWII operation of the same name. The goal of Mincemeat was to disguise a planned Allied invasion of Scilly by convincing the Germans that the real target was Sardinia and Greece.
British intelligence outfitted Captain William Martin with a set of forged documents and dropped him into the sea where he could be recovered by German intelligence. The catch: William Martin was entirely fictitious. The body dropped into the sea belonged to Glyndwr Michael, a homeless man who had died from eating rat poison.
The plot worked. The German army redeployed forces from Scilly to Sardinia, allowing the Allies to land without having to face the bulk of German resistance.
A 2021 film of the same name plays the entire story as a straightforward drama. The Broadway version leans into comedy, deploying the sort of barely controlled chaos typical of British farce – think “Noises Off” or “The Play That Goes Wrong,” only in Whitehall and the MI5 offices instead of backstage at a theater.
The show’s focus is the creation of William Martin (or Bill) – one of the show’s big numbers is titled “Making a Man” – and the thought and care that go into constructing a fictitious person whose identity will hold up under the scrutiny of German intelligence. “Dear Bill,” in which Hester composes a love letter from Bill’s equally fake fiancée, brings a rare moment of melancholy to the otherwise madcap proceedings.
“Mincemeat” and “Rocky Horror” both rest on making a man – a work that is not “of art” but that is perhaps nevertheless one kind of answer to Duchamp’s question.
