In a few short years, Lesli Margherita has turned herself into a local favorite. She’s one of those performers who firmly believe that over-the-top performing is never sufficiently over-the-top. Combining that gleeful attitude with beauty and a strong voice, she has audiences eating out of her well-manicured hand.
In Who’s Holiday, at the Westside Theatre/Upstairs, she’s found a character with whom she jibes like eggs with ham. She’s Cindy Lou Who, whom fans of Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas know as a 2-year-old charmer.
But this isn’t Cindy Lou Who at 2. This is the grown-up, filled out (low-cut costumes by Jess Goldstein) Cindy Lou whom the Grinch eventually stole along with Christmas. Not only did he steal her, but they also wed and had a green-tinged child, Patty, together—Patty, who’s taken away from Cindy Lou after the Grinch grinches yet again.
No, all didn’t work out pleasantly—and it doesn’t work out in mostly rhymed iambic pentameter couplets. Now the 35-ish-40-ish Cindy Lou is an irrepressible vulgarian about to throw a Christmas Eve party in her small Mount Crumpit abode. Since there’s no fourth wall there, she apologizes to the audience members for not inviting them to her soirée. Nevertheless, she’s happy to address them while smoking, drinking and tossing out obscenities as if they were stocking stuffers.
Matthew Lombardo, who specializes in one-woman monologues (High, Looped, Tea at Five, among them), dreamed up this 60-minute travesty and decided that, while Cindy Lou could be a lively potty-mouth, she also needs to win sympathy for the way she’s turned out.
So after several of her expected guests phone their regrets or send them through a window, she explains how she came to be jailed for 10 years and how that hard time with a tough yet thoughtful cellmate leavened her.
Along the way, Margherita gets to sing, interact with an audience member (whom she continues to insult throughout) and twist her ombre-blond hair around her finger. As directed by Carl Andress of Charles Busch fame, it’s all slightly tacky, but tackiness doesn’t always preclude some kind of fun.
Incidentally, its slightly jarring these days when genitalia-grabbing is such a prominent issue to watch a sex comedy that plays by longtime standards newly under question. But maybe that’s a discussion for another time.
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The Dan Rothenberg-Colleen Crabtree Hot Mess, at the Jerry Orbach Theater, is neither a hot mess nor a cold mess. It’s a lukewarm rom-com, in which two stand-up comics specializing in the four-, seven- and 12-letter words that pass for comedy these days find each other.
The catch is that Elanor (Lucy DeVito of well-known comic parentage) has been dumped by someone for his gay lover, and new main squeeze Max (Max Crumm), is bisexual. Understandably, this creates complications that take all of 60 minutes to untangle.
The pluses here include the deft Crumm and DeVito, who—once Max and Elanor convince each other how comedy-venue hilarious Max and Elanor are—show the lovers facing their commitment problem. That’s to say, when Max realizes Elanor’s resistance to possibly repeating her past, he’s reluctant to reveal his. He’s encouraged to come clean by friend Lewis (Paul Molnar) but not helped by swishy ex-boyfriend Steve (Molnar). He takes most of those 60 minutes getting around to following the good advice.
If Hot Mess is about anything deeper than what’s on its mildly undulating surface, it’s concerned with recognizing that relationships today aren’t always what they used to be. Should anyone want to get anywhere, a new flexibility is required. So take that contemporary message for what it’s worth.