Until the mid-1600s, female characters in English-speaking theater were all played by males. Shakespeare tickled the underbelly of this tradition by writing characters who further cross-dressed for comic confusion. Hence the likes of As You Like It, in which a boy actor played a girl who disguises herself as a boy in order to seduce a girl played by another boy actor.
Head Over Heels, the exuberant new musical that opened at the Curran Theater last Wednesday night in advance of a Broadway opening this summer, ups the Edwardian ante for identity-bending comedy. Through songs by 1980s rockers the Go-Go's and a script-in-verse loosely based on Arcadia, a 16th-century tale by Sir Philip Sidney, Head Over Heels takes assumptions about not just gender, but gender roles and sexual orientation, and sets them spinning.
The overarching plot is simple. The king of Arcadia and his subjects embark on a road trip in order to avoid a prophesied disaster. Their itinerary includes Lesbos and Bohemia. But the delight is in the details, and by journey's end, all of the major characters have grown by reckoning with fluidity of the Id. Spurning a slew of hunky suitors, vain and pushy Princess Pamela (Bonnie Milligan) slowly comes to realize that she leans toward ladies. Little sister Philoclea (Alexandra Socha) also proves open to same-sex attraction.
The meek shepherd Musidorus (Andrew Durand, hilariously hybridizing Don Knotts and Jim Parsons) finds his inner strength while donning a thigh-revealing skirt and conical bra. The King and Queen (Jeremy Kushner and Rachel York) rekindle old affection through unplanned experimentation.
And the oracular Pythio played by Peppermint, who will soon become the first transgender woman ever to originate a major Broadway role, reunites with her ex-husband after he relinquishes his fear of the nonbinary and embraces a new use of pronouns.
While San Francisco's opening night audience greeted these developments with happy laughter and roars of approval, it's hard to imagine Head Over Heels connecting with mainstream American theater audiences even a decade ago. But in society as in comedy, timing is everything. In the wake of Drag Race, the bathroom wars, and nationwide rapture for The Book of Mormon, the many creative risks taken in Head Over Heels may yield Broadway success.
Director Michael Mayer (Hedwig and the Angry Inch, American Idiot) handles the challenging material with an unexpectedly sweet touch. The fractured fairytale is funny, but outright camp is largely kept in check.
Among his greatest assets is Alexandra Socha, who plays her ing�nue princess with a much more natural style than the rest of the cast brings to their more caricatured roles. Socha's warmth and unornamented singing provide Head Over Heels with a down-to-earth element that invites the audience in and provides a necessary counterbalance to the predominant zaniness.
Scenic and lighting design by Julian Crouch and Kevin Adams bring a lovely Maxfield Parrish prettiness to the proceedings. Amplifying the show's spirit, Spencer Liff's choreography largely dispenses with gender roles. The chorus, in costume designer Arianne Phillips' exaggerated codpieces and unisex kilts printed with sheet music, spins into both same- and mixed-sex duos during celebratory, stage-filling numbers including the title song and "Mad About You" (a solo hit for Go-Go's lead singer Belinda Carlisle).
Liff's crisp, angular movement and postures give the show a fresh, contemporary kineticism that keeps it from falling too far into the realm of storybook parody. But when only two or three characters are on the stage, there are obvious lulls in energy. Hopefully these passages will be tightened before Broadway, lest they become Achilles heels for the arrows of the New York press.
Another easily addressed flaw is in the costuming. While the chorus and Pythia are dressed to kill, the royal family, especially King Basilius and Princess Pamela, seem dressed for a children's make-believe party, with giant faux gemstones and cheap, tinselly headgear.
But these are minor quibbles about a show that jubilantly leaps over major hurdles. The orchestration of Go-Go's songs by Tom Kitt (composer of Next to Normal) finds a richness in the music without sacrificing the band's ecstatic earworm hooks.
A common criticism of the Go-Go's music at its most popular was that the lyrics were hard to make out, so kudos to Mayer, Kitt and cast for some of the clearest singing in any recent rock-based musical. This clarity is essential for the dialogue as well, since Magruder's ribald verse, often from the "Old Man of Nantucket" school of poetry, is intricate and needs crystal-clear articulation.
Though it contains cheerful echoes of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and the recent Shakespeare spoof Something Rotten, in both its assembly and its content, this is a singularly novel work of theater. By no means should it be considered a jukebox musical. Head Over Heels forego-goes cheap nostalgia for a smart, sparkly queer-quake of innovation.