Wild Side Story - Looking For A Story Line

Looking For A Story Line

The Wild Side Story plot, later in Europe purported to be “from the wildest side of the trans-Atlantic West”, is mainly about “Bernardo” being visited by problematic little brother, José “Maria” Gonzalez, who cross-dresses convincingly to go job-hunting. With boyfriend-owner “Betty-Sue” busy smoking cigarettes, “Tony” can go gaga over “Maria” and does so without taking a second or even a careful look. A lovesick calamity of abandon unfolds amid pick-pockets, male and female chauvinist pigs, false eyelashes, murder, initially misplaced false boobs, and all is summed up with what amounts to a hippie hypocrisy revival meeting at the end (see below).

“Anita” is portrayed as an extremely dangerous and powerful woman so nobody dares tell her that the reds in her satin skirt and ruffled top clash monstrously. Since she won’t let any real women get close to her man, her girlfriends are two tall, muscular drag queens with hairy armpits, whose motivations for cross-dressing remain unclear (one of them was actually portrayed two times by a recent bank robber, unknown as such to the production). The names of this pair are “Consuelo” and “Obvióla”. They have been reviewed as the "riot act of the show". Each in a stolen nuns' habit, they complain about new competitor “Maria” in a Sound of Music song.

Throughout the story Mae West movie quips, done by all cast members in turn, interrupt the action (with a Laugh-In-type point spotlight) and her version of the song All of Me is also included as a solo for “Consuelo”. Early on, “Betty-Sue” is spied on, in her big number Leader of the Pack (Bette Midler), by the two mischievous queens, and later she gets soused to You Don’t Know what Love Is (Patti Page) before having the traumatic experiences of (1) that technical breakdown and (2) getting slain with that knife.

Songs by La Lupe (Fever with “Obvióla”), Elvis Presley (Trouble with “Bernardo”), Marilyn Monroe (Diamonds... with the girls), of course Lou Reed (Walk on the Wild Side with “Macho”, “Chino” and “Tony”) and Peggy Lee (Is That All There Is? with “Anita”) round out the material performed, aside from a seductive “Maria” having duped “Tony” with The Birds and the Bees (Alma Cogan) and Think about It (Lyn Collins).

Sondheim lyrics are re-performed with new meaning when “Maria” feels “pretty and witty and gay” and “hardly can believe I’m real” or an infuriated “Anita” (in a Carol Burnett version) shouts “stick to your own kind!” at her. A meticulously directed reinterpretation of the enchanting Tonight song has “Tony” torn tensely between self-destructive love pangs and ensuing anatomical suspicion, while “Maria” to the audience begins to regret causing so much trouble, just to find employment, and embarks on an exit strategy while fearfully trying to keep “Tony” from screwing it up. When done right, the number has been correctly perceived (for all the comedy in his manuscript) as the climax of a permeating and grave undercurrent of dislike on the part of director Lars Jacob toward a suicidal syndrome in entertainment launched by Romeo and Juliet.

“Obvióla”, decked out like the Queen of the Universe, makes a dramatic physical pass at “Maria” who then finally strips off the girl guise and goes back to being “José Maria”, Shirley Bassey providing the lyric with the drag classic This Is My Life. It is performed here, however, with such increasingly convincing masculinity that the singer’s famous female voice becomes secondary to what the dramatic character is doing. The starring actor then closes his challenging trisexual role with a bit of brother “Bernardo’s” Presley number (as named above) and dons a sequin top hat over jeans and a Puerto Rico t-shirt seen in the Prologue slide show.

One of three to five successive Finale numbers (depending on how you count them) has aspiring soul goddess “Consuelo” in the highest possible beehive hairdo waking all the dead to devise a happy ending. This is done, in what could be considered questionable taste, to a very rousing version of Somewhere from the early 1970s, a live recording in which Diana Ross and the Supremes invoke “Doctor Martin Luther King...” while making large income performing for gamblers at one of the biggest casinos in Las Vegas.