By Tom Sime, KERA 90.1 commentator.
Dallas, TX – Apparently there are plenty of folks out there who have no idea who Mae West was, despite the screen siren's lifelong effort to make herself a notorious household name. Claudia Shear has done her best to fix that with "Dirty Blonde," her eccentric play about the 30s sex symbol who set out to prove, with tongue in cheek, that women like sex as much as men do.
After making a splash and scoring some Tony nominations on Broadway, "Dirty Blonde" is now on tour. Alas, Ms. Shear has moved on to other work, and she's no longer starring in the vehicle she created for herself two years ago. But she's found a worthy replacement in Sally Mayes, the Texas native who's now a Broadway notable herself.
The show is a valentine of mixed feelings to West, who got her start as a child performer on the vaudeville circuit in the early 1900s. Determined to be a major star, she kept hammering away, battling with partners, producers, and police, who arrested her for obscenity in 1927 for her play "Sex." In the early scenes of "Dirty Blonde," we see how fresh and funny, and how liberating, the Mae West character must have been during the Depression. Here, she meets up with Frank Wallace, one of her early vaudeville partners, played by Bob Stillman. Frank sounds the first warning about Mae's pushing of the envelope when, during a rehearsal, he catches her mimicking the hip-rolling moves of the black performers of the day.
Mae plugged away in the shadow of the big time until she finally scored a Broadway hit with Diamond Lil, which was turned into her first star-billing movie, "She Done Him Wrong." But by the time she became a star, Mae was 40, and she froze her hip-wiggling, lustily insinuating persona, attempting to maintain her hourglass figure and siren image until her death in 1980 at age 87. "Dirty Blonde" interweaves scenes from her rise and decline with the story of two of her fans.
Jo, also played by Sally Mayes, meets fellow New Yorker Charlie, played by Tom Riis Farrell, at Mae's crypt. The two strike up a friendship, and start palling around. Jo assumes Charlie's gay, especially after she learns he likes to dress himself up as Mae. But it's not that simple, and "Dirty Blonde" turns out to be a kind of love story as well as Mae West's. Ms. Mayes is perhaps not as vivid a Mae as Ms. Shear was, but she's very appealing, and she pulls off the aging-star scenes with the right balance of macabre humor and pitiable delusion. Still, "Dirty Blonde" is no one-woman show. Stillman, who's also musical director, and Farrell, who plays several characters in addition to Charlie, are superb as well. "Dirty Blonde," like its central character, is at its best when it's light and snappy on its pretty pink box of a set. But there's an undertow of sorrow that gives it unexpected heft. The sadness of Mae West may be the one scandal she didn't unleash on purpose.
Tom Sime is staff critic for The Dallas Morning News.