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Theater review by Adam Feldman
Rating: ★★★★ (four stars)
Ticketing: Buy tickets here
What do women want? To that age-old mystery, three horny hausfraus in the opening number of Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody (all three of them named Susan) offer a solution so simple, so obvious, that it’s amazing it hasn’t been found before now: “Gay. Hockey. Players. With big butts.” That’s the secret of the skate-away success of Heated Rivalry, the hit HBO series about hot young hockey stars who face off on the ice but suck face on the sly. The show’s many steamy sex scenes—“In their beds. On the couch. In their homes. Also in hotels,” the Susans breathlessly sing—are part of its appeal, of course, but it’s the two men’s sincere longing that keeps viewers hooked. Or as the Susans encapsulate it: “Sucking dick–but they’re sad.”
By rights, Dylan MarcAurele’s raunchy musical spoof should not be nearly as funny as it is. But as directed by Alan Kliffer in a sixth-floor space at the Culture Club, the Chelsea complex that used to house Sleep No More’s McKittrick Hotel, this scrappy show is an unexpected delight in the irreverent camp tradition of Silence! The Musical! and the original Asylum production of Titanique. Writer-composer Dylan MarcAurele rolls out a seemingly inexhaustible series of double entendres and works in cultural references from RuPaul’s Drag Race to Ocean Vuong. On an amusing low-tech set by Sully Ross, the high-spirited cast of five actors—led by grade-A cuties Jimin Moon and Jay Armstrong Johnson as the central couple—score with nearly every shot they take.
In MarcAurele’s clever distillation of the series’s plot, Moon plays all-Canadian golden boy Shane Hollander, a cheerful sweetheart with a smile that lights up the rink and a pushy but loving mom (“I’ll always be proud of you, my special, straight son”). Armstrong is his dour but sensitive Russian paramour Ilya Rosanov, who expresses himself in terse, slightly fractured English and has struggled all his life with a condition that has made him a pariah: a freakishly large rear end. “Big ass, cold heart / I’ll play my part,” he sings in a plaintive ballad. “Dead eyes, round butt / My soul close shut.” The evolution of their romance can be tracked by the song names in the score, from “Shane Hollander, Slap That Stick!” and “Eye-Fucking at the Hotel Gym” to “This Fuck Was Different” and, for the pivotal invitation to the cottage, “I Can Host.”
The show is very much aimed at fans of the real Heated Rivalry, and it arrives at just the right time for those of us who couldn’t get enough of the series. The initial wave of obsession having faded, we’re now into the long wait for Season 2, eager for scraps to tide us over. Most of the show’s comedy stems from the tonal clash between the steamy subject matter and the earnestness of traditional musical theater, and it wouldn’t work if the cast weren’t experts at the latter. Aside from Moon and Armstrong, the ace actors —Ryann Redmond, Ryan Duncan and Cherry Torres—wear many hats and don many silly wigs in multiple roles. (The role of veteran hockey man Scott Hunter is performed by an audience member; on the night I attended, it was fellow critic Tim Teeman.) It’s knowingly silly but also, sneakily, just a little sexy, too. It knows how to wink both ways at once.
Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody. The Culture Club (Off Broadway). By Dylan MarcAurele. Directed by Alan Kliffer. With Jimin Moon, Jay Armstrong Johnson, Ryann Redmond, Ryan Duncan, Cherry Torres. Running time: 1hr 15mins. No intermission.
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