My overall impression
HOUSE OF RABBITS CHARIVARI IN VOYEUR-VILLE (Platinum Medal)
“House of Rabbits Charivari in Voyeur-ville” developed by Brandon Baruch and directed by Baruch and Kyle Johnston owes a great deal to The British Music Hall\rock band The Tiger Lillies and their musical reinterpretation of Heinrich Hoffmann’s 19th century children’s book “Der Struwwelpeter” or “Shockheaded Peter”.
Hoffmann’s illustrated book of rhymes was intended to furnish German children with moral instructions, instructions which basically played out as, don’t be a little prick or Shockheaded Peter will swoop down, rip your arms and legs off and replace them with twigs.
House of Rabbits, which describes itself as a: “Hardcore-Vaudeville/Art-Rock band” has created a show which in tone and style takes its “true north” from the Tiger Lillies earlier work. Fortunately, though, Baruch and Johnston were not content with fashioning a mere facsimile, but wisely set off in their own direction. The resulting production, which while it may acknowledge being “inspired by” The Tiger Lillies and “Shockheaded Peter”, is definitely not derivative of the same.
With music by House of Rabbits and book by Jess Gabriell Cron, we are given an odd and exceedingly entertaining highbred of Edward Gorey blended with Bugs Bunny then served as an admonition against the world’s morality police.
You would think that was a no-brainer considering how scenarios attesting to that point surface with regularity and are played out ad nausea in the media: the “family values” conservative is caught picking up hookers, anti-gay marriage legislator is revealed to be paying hush money to former students he molested.
That attempts to impose narrow sexual prohibitions on a society are both hypocritical and doomed, is a lesson the human race seems incapable of learning.
David Offner’s scenic design in conjunction with Laura Wong’s costumes contributes to a sense of the stage dripping with a fetid dampness. The good citizens of Voyeur-ville are portrayed as rabbits and other minor rodents, with Cron belting out tunes as our Virgil, leading us along as we follow Ashley Elizabeth Allen, Cara Manuele and Cory Storey down a tortured path woven from barbed wire and pitted with betrayed love to a dark and disturbing finale.
The show lacks for nothing and achieves much, for which portion of credit must be given to producer Max Oken.
I SAW 57 SHOWS THIS YEAR AND REVIEWED 43 OF THEM. TO READ ALL MY REVIEWS, AS WELL TO SEE MY PICKS FOR THE BEST OF THE FRINGE, GO TO “THE TVOLUTION.COM” THANK YOU ALL FOR SOME AMAZING SHOWS!
ERNEST
