THE JEANETTE/GENETTI SHOW: DON’T MISUNDERSTAND MOLASSES
Jeanette Welp and Carol Genetti at Link’s Hall, August 26 and 27
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The Jeanette/Genetti Show is a variety show, an evening’s worth of disconnected performance bits–solos, duets, and group pieces. None is particularly profound or thought provoking, but all were performed in a genuinely charming, relaxed, off-the-cuff manner–a style not equally suited to all the sketches. The more humorous works in the show flourished, in large part because Welp and Genetti are so playful. But the more contemplative works–the long, visually stimulating dream sequence that ended the first act, for example–felt less like reflective pieces and more like failed humorous works in desperate need of more jokes.
The evening began with the show’s strongest, and funniest, sketch, “Much Match,” in which Welp and Genetti become “prizefighters” in order to comment on the subtle ways women use clothes, makeup, and body language–their weapons, as it were–to compete with other women. None of the ideas is particularly new or surprising, though Robert Metrick’s intentionally lackluster drag act is a hoot: he referees the bout in a knee-length dress that reveals his bony, hairy legs, in effect commenting on performers who use drag to comment on gender roles, an increasingly cliched device. Nothing in the bits that followed came close to equaling the humor or thematic unity of this first sketch, not even the final piece commenting on nuclear war and the inevitability of human aggression.
With all its flaws, The Jeanette/Genetti Show was still far better than Buck and Tim Arubi’s “multimedia guerrilla theater” piece Seven Levels of Love. Written by the two of them, it has a promising premise: Buck Arubi plays various blue-collar losers and lowlifes–an aging alcoholic punk, a crack-addicted prostitute, a dull-witted store manager, a hopelessly egotistical stud, a hapless Generation X-er who spends his days killing and plucking chickens. His acting, directed by Tim Arubi, is astounding; he disappears so completely into each role that I didn’t at first realize that all the monologues were being played by the same actor.
What really makes this evening of mild entertainment disheartening, however, is the fact that it premiered at Club Lower Links (it’s now moved to the Annoyance Theatre). The folks in Cirque du Psycho have about as much in common with the terrific artists who performed in the old Lower Links–Paula Killen, Cheryl Trykv, Matthew Owens–as the indoor golf course in the old CrossCurrents building has with the cabaret that flourished there in the mid-80s.
