Code Foxy: Man Down

Code Foxy: Man Down had life before the Ringwald: this 45-minute late-night show premiered at the Planet Ant Theatre two years ago. Now picked up by Sweetlove Productions and featuring the same performers (the members of the improv troupe Tiger Ride, who also penned the original script), the current iteration feels more like a reunion than a full revival.

In the vein of Charlie's Angels, the five women of Tiger Ride make up the Foxy Tiger Detective Agency. Chassy Tiger (Cara Trautman) is the reformed car expert, Dr. Raven Tiger (Kathryn Trepkowski) is the degree-laden bird whisperer, Summer-Winter Tiger (Anne Faba) is the CIA-trained ditz extraordinaire, and Pam Tiger (Suzan Jacokes) is the retired cop granddaughter of the agency's benefactor, Baron Rex (voiced by David Herbst). Rex's violent end summons the return of his other granddaughter, musician playgirl Sugar Tiger (Lauren Bickers), who announces he was murdered, enlists the group to solve the case, and immediately rekindles her rivalry with sister Pam. True to the source material, the characters appear to be costumed more with overstatement than with actual fabric.

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Die! Mommie! Die!

The promotional material for Who Wants Cake?'s Die! Mommie! Die! gives a big, unsubtle wink to the viewer. "IN 3D!," it cackles, because in contrast to TV and movie entertainments, live theater is inherently three-dimensional, no glasses required. As adorable as the joke is, it's especially fitting for this campy parody, deliciously overacted and overproduced in order to reproduce the sensation of a B-movie genre that director Joe Plambeck likes to call psycho-biddy. Essentially, take Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, and turn it up to eleven.

There's murder and mystery to spare in this action-driven comedy by Charles Busch. Former singing sensation Angela Arden (Joe Bailey) had a career that publicly tanked in the wake of her twin sister's tragic death. A dozen or so years later, the 1967 Angela is trapped in her loveless marriage with diminishing-returns producer Sol Sussman (Alan Madlane) and saddled with a hateful daughter (Melissa Beckwith) and criminally dim son (Vince Kelley). Then Angela hits upon a way out, namely murder, one that takes a truly unorthodox — and wickedly funny — form. The devilish act is followed by: threats of murder, more murder, suspicions of murder, flinging around murder accusations, extracting confessions of murder, solving murders. The cast is rounded out by two Who Wants Cake? newcomers, both from Go Comedy! just around the corner: Suzan M. Jacokes is the hard-swilling, Bible-thumping maid not so secretly in love with Sol, and Bryan Lark is the tennis pro who uses his sole talent of insatiable sexual prowess for leverage with nearly the entire family.

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Hurlyburly

When one attends a play with two intermissions, one expects a marathon. Yet through the superhuman efforts of its actors, the Who Wants Cake? production of David Rabe's Hurlyburly better approximates a three-hour sprint. Fueled by cocaine and self-importance, the characters spew paranoia and cerebral nonsense at each other, rarely managing to actually converse. Marijuana doesn't even slow them down, even though they smoke plenty. The dichotomy created by this cruelly vivid world is the fascination of the antihero: although I personally wouldn't want to interact with these people for any length of time, the remarkable performances behind the characters make them intriguing to study.

The play concerns 1980s Hollywood and a group of men somewhere in the process of being chewed up and spit out by the business. All the action takes place at the home of casting directors Eddie (Stephen Blackwell) and Mickey (Jon Ager), who, together with actor Phil (Joel Mitchell) and writer Artie (Charles Reynolds), form an alliance of superiority and derision sufficient to make the crass, disrespectful guys of Swingers look like Cub Scouts. Blackwell is paranoid and listless; Mitchell once again reinvents the lovable hateable; Reynolds tries achingly hard to fit in, even as he's belittled for his successes; and Ager's cool unflappability is his best work — at least that I've seen — to date. The men are at their peak in a long scene at the beginning of the second act, all playing off each other easily, so comfortably ingrained in their odious roles. Pitch-perfect direction by Joe Bailey generates masterful, layered beats that flow from hilarious group storytelling to tandem solitude.

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[title of show]

I honestly can't think of a better description for the concept behind [title of show], the newest production by Who Wants Cake? at the Ringwald, than the scene in Spaceballs in which the characters (incongruously) pop in the VHS of Spaceballs to spy on what happens in a future scene. But first, they cue up the very part of the movie in which they're watching the movie, forming a picture-in-picture of sorts. One character tries to explain it, and both in real time and on the monitor, he says, "You're looking at now, sir. Everything that happens now, is happening now."

In the same vein, creators Jeff Bowen and Hunter Bell decided to write a musical about writing a musical, starring them and two of their friends (as themselves). So if they say something while writing the show ("Even this?"), if they take their shirts off while preparing for the show (yep), it goes in the show. The original draft was finished in three weeks for submission to a festival. It was a big hit there, and again off-Broadway, and finally enjoyed a run on Broadway, all the while starring them and two of their friends (as themselves). That's not just the history of the musical, that is the musical. Everything that happens now, is happening now.

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Based on a Totally True Story

It's fitting that Based on a Totally True Story was a late entry on the Who Wants Cake? schedule; the script's structure is sometimes reminiscent of a placeholder. Everything from the "based on" of the title to the unassuming candor of the narrative suggests that this is not so much a play by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, but a between-plays struggle with some personal demons, a writing exercise that turned out too good to discard.

Despite that description evoking some self-indulgent drama class exercise, director Joe Bailey's staging is pleasantly surprising in its frequent effectiveness. The story revolves around The Flash comic writer and playwright Ethan Keene (Vince Kelly), who weathers unbelievable success and personal anguish in parallel, and explains the unfolding events while clearly reticent to sort out to what extent each influenced the other. The role does not command the stage; instead, Kelly is enchantingly humble even as he plays notes of discomfort and anxiety, manifesting little tics that blossom into hilarious deliveries, but always with an undercurrent of regret — it's his story, but perhaps he wishes parts of it weren't.

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