“We’ll stick together like Horse Feathers” sings the Jewish entrepreneurial Gold Brothers during Alfred Preisser, Randy Weiner and DJ Cold Cuts new musical farce “King Kong” and therein lies a problem that I don’t how “King Kong” will surmount, but they certainly did not on Monday night at Summerstage. “Horse Feathers” is the 1932 comedy starring the Marx Brothers, some of which was based on the genius acts stage comedy “Fun In Skule “.
Co-written by S.J. Perelman, “Horse Feathers” was comedy as High Art, mixing the Jewish Vaudevillian Brothers rat-a-tat dialogue with physical comedy and satire, as well as comedy song, the all purpose rebellion “I’m Against It” and ode to promiscuity “Everyone Says I Love You”, classics of the genre.
On Monday night, this “King Kong” retelling of the 1930s horror classic moves the action from 1930s New York to 1970s and resurrects the fast pace, wisecracking, pun pulling dialogue of an SJ Perelman, and simply can not pull it off. It isn’t funny. And really, who can do it? “The Hudsucker Proxy”, any one? It’s a lost art form and the “King Kong” mistakes speed for wittiness and fart jokes for sex jokes.
With that said, the 90 minute musical has a lot going for it. The all singing, all dancing, fast paced story uses a bare bones stage to great effect, the story is in constant motion and is well constructed and DJ Cold Cuts song are serviceable though the promise of a Hip Hop Musical isn’t fulfilled. The Brothers Moe, Izzy and Hyman (Matthew Labanca, Sid Solomon and David Michaels) have run Gold Records into the ground with ripoffs of Soul acts like Gladys Knight And The Pips, The Temptations and Jackson 5, with the album returns adding up they latch on to their secretary Faye ( Rhiannon Hansen) new discovery, a purveyor of r&b (not rap) named Kong.
The four go to foreign land the South Bronx in search of Kong only to discover he is a she (Tracy Jack) who falls in love and kidnaps Faye. It all ends up, as these things tend to, at the top of the Empire State Building. Very entertaining, very exciting, well thought out and if not the provocation Preisser and Weiner claim it is, still Preisser gets so much out of the youthful and exciting cast, it is a pleasure to watch them.
The songs are undercooked but nothing that can’t be fixed and once we met King Kong we needed some stand out 1970s inspired rap songs and we don’t get anything that handles the duties. Surely, the musical point counterpoint was not Vaudeville versus Andrew Lloyd Webberish ballads, but vaudeville versus rap. That’s the story, that’s the transition. You can’t have a story about the birth of rap and miss out on the rap.The problem isn’t Jewish people, or blacks, or women (maybe the gayish Ed Koch if he was still kicking night) taking offense. It doesn’t dig deep enough -if controversy is what they wanted, some form of social commentary, they should have made all the characters a lot tougher to take. This is just a good time.
When I saw “Power Of The Trinity” here last year, also directed by Preisser, it felt unfinished but at least it had Tomas Doncker’s music, this is unfinished and the music isn’t ready. It isn’t bad, it just needs more work. “King Kong” gains nothing by being in Central Park -they don’t use the environment at all; coming from one of the men responsible for the site specific “Sleep No More” this is odd indeed. All the music is pre-recorded and that’s another loss.
The audience at Summerstage, and I myself, enjoyed the good will, the smart pace, the willful desire to give pleasure while still feeling as though we had just watched something undernourished. It needs more time, more money, and better dialog
Grade: C+