Revenge Song is a campy, bawdy musical about a real character, a bad-ass woman named Julie d’Aubigny, who lived in 17th century France and was openly bi-sexual. Played by the fiery, multi-talented Margaret Odette, Julie had affairs with both men and women, loved to fight duels, beat a murder rap, and became a famous singer, star of the Paris Opera. Revenge Song, now at the Geffen, was developed by the Vampire Cowboys, an award-winning NYC downtown theatre company that “creates and produces new works of genre-bending theater.” Matt Shakman, artistic director of the Geffen, is a big fan of Vampire Cowboys and was responsible for commissioning Revenge Song and bringing it to L.A. The production, directed by VC co-founder Robert Ross Parker, pulls out all the stops in telling its bizarre but sometimes affecting story: French and American rap music, puppetry, kung fu, L.A. jokes, dick jokes, video projection. The six-person cast is required to sing, dance, clown, and trick itself out in one outrageous costume after another. All this unfolds at high speed, propelled by Qui Nguyen’s comic book-like dialogue, which takes liberties with history, time, and believability yet manages to be consistently laugh-out-loud funny and entertaining. Revenge Song is introduced and m.c.’d by Madame de Sennetre (Amy Kim Waschke), a latex-clad dominatrix who promises to punish the audience if it doesn’t obey her instructions (no texting or talking). The Madame also gets sexually involved with Julie late in the story. Noshir Dalal, Beth Hawkes, Tom Myers and Eugene Young are the other actors in the cast; they play multiple roles with astounding ease, sometimes wielding swords with Errol Flynn-like dexterity (thanks to fight captains Maggie Macdonald and Tim Brown). The theme underlying all this tumult and buffoonery is that people should be allowed to love who they please, no matter what their gender, color, or station in life. Okay, it’s not very profound, but it certainly touches a nerve with the youthful fans of geek theatre, the comic-con generation which staid theaters like the Geffen are obviously desperate to attract.
