Wild Side Story - Origins, Style and Technique

Origins, Style and Technique

This cult stage show was first conceived and created in Miami Beach in 1972 by director Lars Jacob for an underground cast of nine poorly paid performers who were in it for the kicks, using stage names such as Rena Del Rio, Peaches Del Monte, Chiena Chinette, Jessica Kilo, Tom Flavio, Crystal Beed and Aretha Filthy so as not to disclose their actual identities. Most were young Cuban refugees. One exception was Roxanne Russell who eventually achieved national notoriety and began to use his real name Logan Carter.

The piece was originally called West Side Tuna because of their preceding highly charismatic, but theatrically needy production, The Hot Tuna Revue, in which, as Del Rio later admitted, "We were just giving faces".

It opened officially as Wild Side Story on August 8, 1973.

Moved two blocks up 22nd Street the following month by club owner Larry Boxx, from the shady old Ambassador III lounge to his brand new Stonewall disco, Wild Side Story reopened there on September 3, 1973, closer to a popular public beach. It now established itself as albeit bizarre but exciting after-midnight entertainment for more diverse crowds. Many were young tourists who would not have planned to go to a gay bar and now saw transvestite characters on stage (and some in the room) for the very first time. The move also brought a revamp of the cast of characters, partly and loosely built on those of West Side Story, with Jacob henceforth casting real girls in leading parts "Anita" and "Betty-Sue". One supporting part continued to call for a female to play a meretricious male gang member called "Macho", which was a first even in cosmopolitan South Florida.

Boxx called Wild Side Story “a fantastic attempt at true camp the way it should be done, and you can quote me on that”.

Though the hour-long show continued to be performed with the cast lip-synching to pre-recorded songs, about half of them from several versions of the Broadway classic, it evolved into something more difficult to classify than a conventional drag show. Character caricatures developed. Lip and tongue motion was intentionally exaggerated to spoof the mouthing method, and a number of live spices, such as America clapping and foot drumming and Rumble screams, were added. When an audience had resolved itself to sit through what looked to many like a sort of pantomime play, "Tony" suddenly sang a special lyric into a live microphone, this confusing even him, even more, after having flipped too indiscriminately over a mysterious “Maria” (see below). Slide shows and 8mm film segments were included. Show-goers were taken by surprise with a takeoff on technical failure where one of the actresses would stomp her foot and begin swearing out loud till her number just as unexpectedly resumed. The long street fight where first "Bernardo" then "Betty-Sue" are fatally stabbed, she with her own knife dug out of the deep of her big gold purse, was done here in slow motion and strobe lighting, an effect staged after 1973 by the directors of a number of other productions.