Martha Clarke's Belle Epoque is an impression of an Impressionist, Toulouse-Lautrec, and the costumes, dances, atmosphere of late 19th-Century French Cafe culture. Clarke creates living paintings with four-foot-tall Mark Povinelli as Lautrec. Stories about Lautrec range from the sentimental to the bizarre. There are arresting visual images from his paintings of a skewed society, with some lovely songs from music of that time well-sung by Joyce Castle that lift the show, rhythmic dance numbers with swirling skirts (costumes by Jane Greenwood), a red-headed woman clown (Ruth Maleczech), and the most supple dancer in town, Robert Besserer, who has truly Amazing Grace: flexibility, plasticity, fluidity, elasticity -- it's worth the price of admission just to see him move, lean, bend, dance. And we get to look at a naked lady as we hear a description of Absinth.
The strength of the show is the movement and music (directed by Clarke), the weakness is in the text: stilted verbiage (by Clarke and Charles L. Mee). Some is simplistic and obvious as people comment on Lautrec's life, some is merely boring, and it is ultimately depressing because of his miserable, frustrating, ultimately disease-ridden existence.
Povinelli is a good Lautrec, Tome Cousin and the rest of the cast are all excellent. I'd say trim the text way down, add another (perhaps abstract) dance number giving visual insight into his life, and you've got a terrific show.
