What better way to spend a sub-freezing evening in D.C. than at a delightful reading of Charles Busch’s 1990’s camp classic Die, Mommie, Die!. That’s just what an SRO audience at Source last Monday night had the opportunity to do. The newly formed Rainbow Theatre Project, a company that specializes in LGTB theater fare, presented its second production of the season and with this one they have truly hit their stride.
The production boasted a terrific cast of local actors and spot-on direction by Chris Griffin. This little-performed play is a campy hoot, and the RTP production mined every possible laugh. Among the cast, special mention must be made of Kris Roth who played Bootsie, the maid, Jen Bevan as Edith, the daddy-obsessed daughter and Ernie Achenbach as Tony, the mysterious neighbor who is hiding a big secret. The entire cast seemed to be having as much fun as the audience and even managed to make a tiny number of on-stage glitches work to their advantage. A flying wig garnered one of the biggest laughs of the evening. Mommie deserves a fully-staged production by a local theater company sometime soon.
The evening opened with a short play entitled Romeo and Jules, a comic reimagining of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet by Ron Burch. Jeremy Pace and Laurence Wallace were both excellent as the “star-crossed lovers” and once again we were reminded of the timelessness of Shakespeare’s classic.
RTP’s next reading will be the short play White Room w/Red Door by Frank Anthony Polito followed by the full-length Say You Love Satan by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. Performance date is set for Monday, February 24, 2014 at 7:30 at Source Theater. Admission is free and donations will be gratefully accepted. Come out and support this talented, worthy new theater group.
LINK
Rainbow Theatre Project’s website.
