ARCHY AND MEHITABEL
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Call it “Cats Meets Kafka,” or “Aesop Eats the Big Apple”: Archy and Mehitabel is a study of human nature at its most fallible and fragile depicted through the antics of anthropomorphized animals. Its heroine, Mehitabel, has–let’s be frank–the morals of an alley cat. But that’s OK; she is an alley cat. Her pal Archy, who adores her from afar, is a cockroach who dreams of being blond and six feet tall so he can win Mehitabel’s affections away from the tough toms who come pussyfooting along. If it seems unlikely that a cockroach would fall in love with a cat–well, that’s no less ludicrous than some of the human misalliances you see every day.
So poor bighearted, bug-sized Archy pines after his free-footed feline friend, who wants nothing more from life than a fish head now and then and freedom all the time. “Toujours gai” is her motto–but anxious Archy thinks she’s a little too toujours gai. It’s not just that he wants her for himself: a human at heart (he claims to be a reincarnated free-verse poet), he’s preoccupied with repressing his and everyone else’s animal instincts, no matter how unlikely his success. When Archy tries to reform Mehitabel by getting her a position as an upper-class house cat, the scheme goes sour: the life of the idle rich just isn’t her saucer of cream. When Mehitabel runs off with Big Bill, the brutish, battle-scarred tomcat who wins her heart for a couple of weeks, a despairing Archy tries to commit suicide–and finds out what every human already knows: the damn insects are virtually indestructible. (He needs a cockroach Kevorkian.)
much when they wring her
while every one gets
Director Dale Calandra gives the show a wonderfully ragtag feel, aided by David Puszh’s tough-edged choreography (in one sequence tap dancers wear trash-can lids for shoes), Lynn Sandberg’s crazy-quilt costume designs, and set designer Rob Hamilton’s densely detailed Shinbone Alley slum. Mark Elliott capably leads a four-piece band (highlighted by trumpeter George Goetschel) through Kleinsinger’s bluesy, sometimes jagged, sometimes vaudevillian jazz score. The strong cast includes Shane Taylor as a forceful if insufficiently feline Mehitabel, Paul Oakley Stovall as Big Bill, and RJ Coleman as Tyrone T. Tattersall, the hammy theater cat who briefly tries to teach Mehitabel the art of acting. (She has the claws for it, he opines, but all her talent’s in her tail.)
