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Hollywood and Broadway

Reviewed by Neal Weaver

Teatro De La O at Hudson Guild Theatre

Through March 22

Last year, Teatro De La O and writer/director/couturier Octavio Carlin produced a show called Hollywood Party. It was set in Hollywood in the Silent Era, and featured campy, not very convincing impersonations of the famous divas and male stars of the era. There was a confusing and improbable plot, involving an assortment of jewel thieves, including a frantically overacting butler.

Now they’re back, with a new show that resembles outtakes from Hollywood Party. There’s the same preoccupation with temperamental divas, more or less the same plot about jewel thieves, some of the same actors, the same strenuously mugging Butler (Terence Gene Taylor), and the same reliance on telephones that are visibly not connected to anything (and this was long before the time of cordless phones). And one of the same actresses, Christina Lemon, is playing minor star Aileen Pringle.

The action, such as it is, is set in NYC’s Astor Hotel on the occasion of the presentation of the Page One Awards for show business luminaries. Both Tallulah Bankhead (Olivia Choate), who was then hosting a 90-minute radio variety show called The Big Show, and Gloria Swanson (Kat Brower), who had just been justly acclaimed for her role in Sunset Boulevard, are slated to receive Career Achievement Awards. Both are incensed at having to share the spotlight with an arch rival. Most of the plot time is spent on the prolonged and predictable bitch fight between Bankhead and Swanson, which eventually devolves into hair-pulling physical violence.

A minor and pointless sub-plot involves Swanson’s obsessive determination to wring from Pringle an account of what Rudolf Valentino said to H.L. Menken (Pringle’s lover) regarding the breakup of his marriage to Natacha Rambova. (Turns out Pringle doesn’t know.) There’s also a hotel clerk (Danny Menendez) charged with keeping the bibulous Bankhead sober till after the ceremony, and the aforementioned butler who has designs on the fabulous jeweled necklaces worn by the ladies.

Clearly, Carlin has an obsessed fan’s profound knowledge of show business history and a determination to drop every name he can think of, but he lacks the ability to make anything of it other than cliché-ridden caricature. (Those with extensive knowledge often feel determined to use it, at all costs, no matter how irrelevant.)

The actors all give evidence of being capable of better things if only their material were better. Kat Brower was one of the highlights of Hollywood Party, but here she’s hampered by a blandly undeveloped role as Swanson.

We’re told the show’s running time is 80 minutes, but it felt like forever. On the plus side, Ricardo Mora Hidalgo’s set was nice.

Teatro de le O at the Hudson Guild Theatre, 6539 Santa Monica Boulevard, Hlywd; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun.. 3 p.m.; through March 22. (323) 960-7740, www.plays411.com/hollywoodbroadway.