Devil Boys from Beyond

Well, here we are again. Another day, another 15 Fringe reviews. As of later tonight, the official tally—for those of you who for some reason are not tracking it as closely as I—will be this: 188 down, lucky 13 to go. You can read all the reviews yourself, of course, on our massively popular and now tantalizingly almost-complete Fringe Binge 2009 page. The highlight of today’s crop is a show I’m lucky to have reviewed myself: the giddy, campy and quite wonderful Devil Boys from Beyond. The ramshackle aesthetic of the show ensures that it could comfortably move to a post-Fringe run with almost no alterations necessary. Meanwhile, though, I urge you to catch one of its three remaining performances at the Actors’ Playhouse, where it runs through Sunday, August 30. (Call 866-468-7619 for tickets.) Below is an early look at my over-the moon review of this alien romp.

Devil Boys from Beyond
***** [FIVE STARS] Buddy Thomas’s deliriously campy sci-fi spoof, one of the most entertaining shows I have ever seen at the Fringe Festival, is naughty, gleeful fun. A pair of Eisenhower-era New Yorkers—a hard-nosed lady reporter, Mattie Van Buren (Paul Pecorino), and her boozy ex-flame, Gregory Graham (Robert Berliner)—investigate an alien landing in the backward town of Lizard Lick, Florida, while fending off Mattie’s nosy and archconservative rival, Lucinda Marsh (Chris Dell’Armo). The out-of-this-world visitors in question turn out to be smoothly gorgeous muscle studs, who have attached themselves to the town’s sex-starved older women. Milking this setup for all its worth and then some, the show opens a fabulous portal to the past: not just the paranoid world of the 1950s, but to the legendary drag romps of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company and Charles Busch’s Theatre-in-Limbo from the 1960s through the 1980s. Devil Boys from Beyond is a necklace of golden links to that wild theatrical tradition. The play’s director, Kenneth Elliott, also helmed most of Busch’s early work (much of which featured Andy Halliday, who appears here as innkeeper Dotty Primrose). The expert Pecorino—who at times bears an odd resemblance to Madonna, except that he can act—is a veteran of the Off Broadway revivals of Busch’s Psycho Beach Party and Ludlam’s The Mystery of Irma Vep. And Everett Quinton, the widower Ludlam himself, gives a simply astonishing performance as a horny, elderly Lizard Lick resident: This is clowning of the very highest order. Jabbing their lewd lines with hatpin-prick timing, their eyes flashing like paparazzi cameras, the marvelous actors of Devil Boys from Beyond are fashioning something very silly and special at the Actors’ Playhouse. If there were any justice in this mixed-up world of ours, the whole show would be tractor-beamed Off Broadway tomorrow.—Adam Feldman, Theater and Music writer