JUNGLE BELLES, though, adds more. The starting point is an innocent little story about a tropical island where the Amazons, under the benevolent Queen Foraday (Uzal S.H. Taylor) and the evil Witch Wayzup (Jon Isham), have lived for 20 years completely free of men--though some of them are nostalgic for "the feel of a man around... and the sex!". When their sustaining Fountain of Youth breaks down, though, the Witch tells them they can only fix it by bringing back men, which, in turn, can only be achieved by pushing the beautiful Princess Kitty Litter (Robert Coburn) into a volcano.
Fortuitously, a shipful of Conquisatores show up, led by Captain Walter Wallcarpeting (Anthony Calnek), in search of the Island's unspeakably precious jewel, the William Sapphire. They inadvertently bring along an evil pseudo-cleric. Missionary Position (Jon Shapiro), whose dream is to bring the Island and then the world into his mind-control cult. ("It wouldn't take much for a Guyana little Kool-Aid to start a religion here," he muses.) He teams up with the witch, the innumerable romances start, a noted TV personality emerges from the fountain, the Queen falls in love, and so forth.
But writer/lyricists Calnek and Alison Taylor have infused some much-needed variety into these overwrought proceedings. For one thing, they've varied their targets of satire a little. There is not, for a wonder, a single and compulsive joke, even after Missionary Position and Witch Wayzup join forces. (You might still think twice about inviting your parents, though.) A certain eclecticism is apparent: Not only do the maidens pray "Boola boola, Eli Yale," but Wayzup laments, "Hath not a witch eyes?"
MORE REFRESHING than all this is that the yuks betray an intelligent pattern or two. Taylor and Calnek aren't so dumb as to take themselves or the show seriously (a Battle of the Sexes satire in drag?), but they abandon the sterile money/sex/class warfare formula of recent years for some genuinely fresh jabs at popular culture. TV commercial references abound--"This is mutiny, men!" "Yeah, it'll take more than Bounty to clean up this mess." Missionary Position's Sun Myung Moon-esque paradise turns out to be McDonald's, with the preacher at his pulpit dispensing McNuggets of wisdom. Moon and McDonald's are, in fact, recurring themes throughout. And if we're talking themes, Ring Around the Collar, South Pacific, the Pi Eta Speaker's Club, breakfast cereals, old-boy networks, the Harvard Krokodiloes, and alligator/crocodile phenomena in general also undergo rigorous analysis.
Such stuff is harder to pull off than sex-and-money jokes, and Act I occasionally betrays the strain. Random Star Trek and sportscasting segments come across more like The Groove Tube than pastiche; gags spliced in from other humorists without apparent reason--including Tom Lehrer's "Ave Maria, Gee it's good to see ya" and Monty Python's "No! No singing!"--seem like mere cribs.
It's in the second act that things really begin to move--a welcome change from previous shows whose second acts just filled the time till the kickline. And the obligatory pun-fest midway through the act makes everything all right. The writers also deserve kudos for being the first in many years to actually offer a plot rationalization for the kickline itself, even if that rationalization, is too silly to appear in print.
NEW BLOOD in the humor department is matched by new blood on stage. A few towering, er, figures are familiar from previous years--Adam Isaacs as Maxine the Mermaid, Christopher Charron at the Queen's dimwitted spinster sister Auntie Emenem, Michael Allio as the belle Constance Lee Whining, and Calnek at the Captain. The years appear to have taught them some important skills how to project a falsetto voice past the first three rows, how to act during a kickline when you're stuck in a mermaid's tail, and how to keep a straight face when your wig flies off or when people scream "Oooh, Anthony, you author!" from the back of the theater.
In addition to such basics, some veterans--Isaacs in particular--have totally mastered the art of female impersonation, from hip-away to eyelashes to throaty, sexy chuckles. In Maxine the Mermaid, Isaacs creates one of the funniest Pudding stage characters seen in recent years, and his curtain-raising number in Act II, "Femme Fatale," is the show's biggest blockbuster.
Nor is it the only one. Taylor as the Queen is an equal match to Isaacs riveting performance. Where Isaacs slinks, Taylor jiggles. He fusses shrilly over Kitty Litter and conquers his hostility towards men with an alacrity that would have made Freud proud. Some where in the process, his lesson to Kitty on the Facts of Life and how to with stand them brings down the house.
The songs by David Chase are uniformly tuneful and sturdily orchestrated enough to carry the audience over the weak spots in the lyrics. Another help is the able choreography by Karen Maria Pisani. Watching those exemplary pelvic thrusts really passes the time while you're waiting for the inevitable "wives" to rhyme with "lives," and the dancers always deliver--although, truth be told, real go-go girls wouldn't bump into their own breasts quite so often.
The show's final big bonus is Don Meuse's extraordinarily varied and ornate scenery; the nine sets include the CocaBanana Nightclub, the Queen's ice palace (used for calisthenics), and the Little Swamp of Horrors, which sports a killer bush. Clever choreography around the curtain spares the audience the tiresome delays of scene changing--a blessing, since, when a show's whole stock in trade lies in being collegiate, even a little high-schoolishness can turn it sour.
OF COURSE, half the fun of witnessing a 136-year-old in-joke is watching its effect on a total outsider. A Pudding audience's attention always flags by the middle of Act II, regardless of its dramatic quality, around about the time that the bottles of champagne from intermission run dry. By the time Queen Foraday and Captain Walter Wallcarpeting got together last night, fully half the audience was busy twisting around to watch Sean Connery's reactions. The Man of the Year had acted dignified and shy at the presentation, softspoken at the intermission press conference, but he did say it was his first visit to an Ivy League College so the growing look of confusion on his face was understandable. What was he to make of the significance of eight alligator heads or of one character's being offered a Pi Eta cocktail (40 beers in 30 seconds)? The clever lyrics about the old-boy network, which brought lumpen to the throats of the bourgeoisie, left him cold.
Then, sometime before the witch and the priest unloosed their awful revenge on the pristine jungle things started to change. One character threw out a string of Bond Jokes; his love answered, "Roger." The Man of the Year, being human, laughed. The audience kept drinking. The Belles did their schtick, then stripped down to yellow stain bikinis and did it again.
Even if Connery had minded being dressed up in a wig and insulted by a lot of preppies, he probably would have been grinning by then; revenge is sweet, but so is the Pudding show. The Secret Service man on his left cracked a smile.