By Ernest Kearney — Doctor Zomba’s Ghost Show, David Lucarelli’s loopy homage to late night television horror hosts, was plainly rooted in his appreciation for the hi-jinks of Jeepers Creepers, Elvira and others.
Lucarelli reveals himself as a dedicated “Metalhead” with his new production, Crude. He was legally coerced into employing the surrogate title Crude after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from a lawyer representing the individuals whose story he intended to tell. Though a compulsory proxy, the title is still somewhat fitting for the play’s actual subject, Mötley Crüe.
The mere mention of LA’s seminal “world’s most notorious” heavy metal band instantly conjures up headbanging images of $1,000 a day heroin habits, cascading women, destroyed hotel rooms, sex tapes, drunken studio sessions, car wrecks, assaults, over doses, bar brawls and raging performances that would sell over a hundred million albums.
Lucarelli manages to include most of the aforementioned aspects in his play, but unfortunately he has chosen to confine all these highly dramatic incidents within a narrative structure that works to defuse and dilute them to the extreme.
Choosing to tell the Mötley Crüe story in short scenes, could have succeeded if Lucarelli had approached their unfolding with a rapidness similar to the band’s amphetamine fueled music.
However, Lucarelli’s decision to have each scene introduced by a masked “Spirit of Metal” major domo, hamstrings the pacing to a deadly limp and the continual use of this episodic device subjects his audience to repeated dead space on stage and a numbing barrage of recurring blackouts.
Among the shuffling of short-short scenes, a few longer ones actually begin to draw in the audience, but each of these is immediately stunted by a series of acutely truncated scenes that drop like a chorus line of guillotine blades.
There is probably an interesting play within Crude, but it simply can’t escape the straitjacketing in which Lucarelli has imprisoned it.
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Crude
Presented
Aug. 21, 22, and 23rd
onstage at
The Flight Theater @The Complex Hollywood
6476 Santa Monica Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90038
