A Born Again Diva

i'l be in NYC on Oct 17-18, maybe a day before or after that. are you still in town then?

Not this one. But he'll certainly see WHAT'S UP, URANUS? -the outer space musical in the spring.

Landry plays it straight in nod to 'Twilight Zone'
(By Sandy MacDonald, Boston Globe, October 17, 2006)

Any attempt to parody the early '60s TV series ``The Twilight Zone" would seem to be an exercise in redundancy: Time has already done the trick, cutting these high-concept sci-fi experiments down to laughable size. To feel their full impact, you'd have to have been there when the show first aired, at a time when baby boomers looked to the tube for the slightest sign that the age of conformity might one day come to an end.

``The Twilight Zone" delivered this in spades. And in resurrecting three classic episodes -- ``Eye of the Beholder," ``Living Doll," and ``The Invaders" -- Ryan Landry and his troupe of Gold Dust Orphans don't so much spoof as render homage.

The territory is a little tamer than in such recent shows as ``Who's Afraid of the Virgin Mary?" and ``Death of a Saleslady, " and fewer liberties are taken. Perhaps because Landry was extra-busy last summer, simultaneously playing Caesar in Provincetown's ``Cleopatra" and the Wicked Stepmother in the Ogunquit Playhouse ``Cinderella," less of his distinctive verbal wit is on display. With some minor exceptions, the Orphans play these vignettes straight; they even employ Bernard Herrmann's signature scoring.

Not that their version doesn't yield myriad delights -- starting with Billy Hough's spot-on impression of host Rod Serling, he of the soul-boring gaze and lockjaw delivery. His portentous prologues winkingly bracket the action, which is served up shuffle-style.

``Eye of the Beholder," in which a hideously ``deformed" woman anxiously awaits the outcome of her latest surgery, opens and closes the show, with interludes inserted amid the other two stories. It wouldn't do to divulge the closing twist (which may come as a surprise to very few), but it does seem a shame to cast the expressive Penny Champayne (Gold Dust vet Scott Martino ) in a role that enshrouds her till the very end. Once unwrapped, Champayne gives full vent to the tremulous moues of a siren. And in all three skits, we have the pleasure of Martino's clever costumes and props -- a domed plastic wastebasket lid serving as scaled-down spaceship, for instance.

The funniest part of ``Eye" is a bit of stage business performed by a lusty doctor-and-nurse duo (Gene Dante and Sharon Hart ). Dressing after a tryst, they engage in elaborate choreography to camouflage their facial features -- a trick achieved in the TV version mostly through strategic shadows.

In ``The Invaders," Landry takes Agnes Moorehead 's solo role of a peasant woman under attack by tiny alien invaders. Again, it seems a pity to render Landry, a reliable font of outrageous bon mots, near mute. Still, he vocalizes evocatively while giving the mini-marauders what for.

``Living Doll" is the most developed script: A bullying husband (Larry Coen , in the Telly Savalas role) begrudges his perky young stepdaughter (Hart again) the fancy talking doll bestowed on her by her doting mother (company regular Olive Another , sporting ersatz Chanel). ``Talkie Tina" tends to spout sugary declarations of love, but not to the brute-in-residence. In this hilariously dysfunctional household, it's man against doll in a fight to the finish -- and not the mild, ``ironic" finish that the script's originators had in mind, but one with a gross-out Grand Guignol flourish.

It's the boldest departure in a fairly faithful revival. Compared to the rest of the canon, this is Landry Lite, less seditious than the norm. Still, Landry and company, even in a relatively sedate mode, measure up pleasurably to outré almost anyone else.