MOONIE THE MAGNIFICENT
at the Theatre Building
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To accommodate both audiences, Moonie is now appearing in a matinee on Saturday afternoons (when the adults usually outnumber the children eight to one) and a late-night stint on Fridays, following The Conquest of the South Pole (also featuring Johnson). Though chunks of the two shows are similar, the later time slot permits Moonie to show his, uh, darker side. The nocturnal clown may open his show with a parody of performance art, in which he reads Shakespeare in a kazoolike voice from behind a gas mask. He may poke fun at audience members (a woman called on to assist in a stunt squirmed and giggled so much that Moonie started to mimic her movements). The songs with which he closes the show may include the plaintive sympathy-for-the-flasher ballad “Willie” (“How can you call him a criminal / When all he wants is to show his genitals?”); the creepy “Herb and Emma,” a tale of possible murder narrated through phone-machine messages; or the sly “Skipper’s Song,” which conjectures about the carefully repressed relationships among the denizens of Gilligan’s Island.
PIE (Projects in Education) Story Theatre is also putting on a multigenerational Saturday-afternoon show. It’s produced by the Emerging Artists Project, Inc., an organization “dedicated to involving, educating and serving emerging and established playwrights and other theatre artists.” One might expect a little 60-minute revue to founder under the weight of these lofty goals, but the seven-member ensemble delivers uniformly tight, intelligent, well-rehearsed performances of original and adapted material that’s devoid of the silliness and preachiness that plague so much kiddie drama.
