What's worse than overhearing critics dissing your play during intermission? How about hearing from your donors that they are withdrawing their support after seeing the first act of the new play? Or perhaps it's having a board member suggest you fire yourself halfway through the opening-night performance because it's not gay enough for an ostensibly gay theater.
These scenarios play out right after the audience has returned for the second act of Theatre Rhino's The Battle of Midway! Live! Onstage! That the artistic director and playwright under fire is played by John Fisher, who happens to be the artistic director of the company presenting his play, is perhaps strategic, defensive, combative, or diversionary �" apt analogies for a play that's, sort of, about war. Or maybe it's just another joke in a show that's got a million of 'em. And a few kitchen sinks as well.
The intimate confines of ACT's Costume Shop become a theatrical sandbox where grownups often behave like children even as the basic facts surrounding the pivotal 1942 naval battle somehow get told amid wild stylistic mash-ups. Largely it's a boys-with-their-toys story, the toys being battleships and aircraft carriers that are rendered in miniature models that the opposing sides giddily destroy by pounding them with their fists. The generals who have the most toys in the end are the winners.
Despite boys-toys analogies, it's a co-ed cast with men playing the Americans and women the Japanese. "We decided to use the battle of the sexes as a metaphor," a character tells the audience in one of the asides from the theatrical narrative. It's not clear exactly how that metaphor functions, but since another cast member quickly dismisses the comment, we don't have to spend much time pondering its actual relevance to the story being told.
This production revels in pushing its metaphors into burlesque proportions. As jealousies arise among the generals strategizing the American campaign, a successful mission by a showboating Admiral Halsey, played by the young and toned Justin Lucas, leads him to rip off his shirt and go into a disco dance. When Fisher, playing Admiral Fletcher as a pouty perennial runner-up, tries the same, the results are less glorious.
Fisher often puts himself out on a comic limb with his performance as Fletcher. His instincts feel right, and you can see what he's going for with his outlandish mugging and campy delivery, but his resources don't quite scale the ambitious comedic peaks he has created for himself. Donald Currie, as Admiral Nimitz, offers his easier-going style of comedy that does involve occasional outbursts of humping nearby objects. It's hard to single out others in the nine-member cast, who play an array of characters, not to mention fighter planes and a ballet corps who dance a Swan Lake -like sayonara to a sinking ship, although JD Scalzo has some memorable moments as a less-than-commanding commander and Daile Mitchem is an imposing Admiral Yamamoto.
Several songs with lyrics by Fisher and music by Don Seaver (who's at the onstage piano) are fun, and sometimes catchy, especially in a love-song send-up between a Japanese pilot (Kirsten Peacock) and his Tokyo sweetheart (Justin Lucas, now in drag). The "Rosie the Riveter Was a Big Dyke" number is too painfully obvious, but an anthem-like "War" cleverly combines both a Sesame Street lesson-of-the-day message with a melody that can invoke the score from Rent .
Scenery and props by Gilbert Johnson, costumes by Lara Rempel, and lighting by Sean Keehan are in step with the swashbuckling comic tone Fisher has devised. The Battle of Midway itself was filled with hits and misses, and this theatrical Midway accurately reflects that.
Theatre Rhino's The Battle of Midway! Live! Onstage! will run at ACT's Costume Shop through Nov. 30. Tickets are $15-$20. Call (800) 838-3006 or go to therhino.org.