Off-Off-Broadway's Daffy Diva

By RICHARD CORLISS

GALAS at the Ridiculous Theatrical Company

Such are the demands of art that great performers must often display their power and grace in the most outlandish haberdashery. Watch Julius Erving in short pants, Mikhail Baryshnikov in tights--or Charles Ludlam in a turquoise-and-orange evening dress. It is true that Ludlam, the founder, artistic director, playwright-in-residence, director and shining star of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, can often be seen striding the tiny stage of his Greenwich Village theater in trousers. He has trod these boards as the satyric Bluebeard, as Ebenezer Scrooge, as a neurotic shrink in Reverse Psychology, even as Rufus Foufas, a bamboozled patron of the arts in Le Bourgeois Avant-Garde. But nothing brings out a farceur's spirit of adventure like a cunning little Empire nightgown. It was as a delicately audacious Marguerite Gautier in his 1973 Camille that Ludlam first broke out of the circle of his off-off-Broadway camp followers and into more general acclaim. Ten years later he is packing them into the Ridiculous with his impersonation of Maria Callas in a giddy travesty called Galas.

Ludlam traces every seismic bump in the career of Maria Magdalena Galas: her fierce determination to be a star ("I am a musician, I am a musical instrument, I am music!"); her marriage to the millionaire brickmaker Giovanni Baptista Mercanteggini ("Bricks, of all things," Maria demurely deadpans on learning of his trade); her dalliance with the Greek tycoon Aristotle Plato Socrates Odysseus (who admits that he finds Maria "a suitable object for worship"); her sparring with Pope Sixtus VII over matters musical ("I'm Greek Orthodox," she explains to a friend. "To me he's just another bishop"); her triumphs and decline ("Where is my voice? I call it and call it and it will not answer"); her tragic early death as she ascends into delirium and stabs herself with a stiletto concealed in the ribbing of her Tosca fan. Then Ludlam brings his audience back to earth with a deliciously silly curtain call.

Like Ludlam's 25 earlier Ridiculous plays (which include burlesques of Wagner, sci-fi movies, high fashion, sexual fads and children's puppet shows), Galas means to be, well, ridiculous. And this diva is frequently a figure of bawdy fun. Crossing her legs, smoothing her hair, blowing a kiss, myopically eyeing a newspaper story, waving a black-gloved finger under the Pope's nose, manipulating that goofy face into a thousand contortions of hauteur and despair, Ludlam's Galas pushes the mannerisms of every grandi ose superstar from Traubel to Tallulah one octave higher to achieve parody in perfect pitch.

By the climax, Ludlam has moved from funny halfway to sublime. He does not keep the satirist's distance from Galas; he inhabits her, and turns ram shackle farce into full-throated melodrama.

Leading a band of faithful players who dare only to flirt with competence, producing his extravaganzas on shoestring budgets, Ludlam is a star in the vanishing tradition of the actor-manager. The Ludlam line may go back even further, to the capering Pantaloons of Renaissance Italy.

With reckless energy and a wickedly contemporary show-biz savvy, this clown prince is putting the art back in commedia dell' arte.

-- By Richard Corliss This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.