Latino Drag Charlie's Angels

Chico's Angels Cavern Club Theater. 5/26/06.

The Cavern Club continues to mystify me. It would be an awesome queer theater in the basement of a Mexican restaurant, except that the twohttp://www.cavernclubtheater.com/CHICO.html shows I've seen have had surprisingly straight casts and audiences. Chico's Angels Episode 3: Chicas in Chains was an odd combination of fabulously campy drag and a slightly off back-up cast who lacked a camp sensibility.

The Angels, led by the truly magnificent Kaye Sedia, were the stars of the show and any moments they were offstage seriously lagged. Kaye was hilarious, and the rest of the Angels were pretty fun as well. The hilight of the show by far was Kaye's rendition of "Hopelessly Deported from You" to the tune of "Hopelessly Devoted to You." That alone made my day.

The most painful moment of the show was the women-in-prison scenes, which completely failed as representations of sapphic films. The fairly normative female cast, who should have been either men in drag or recognizably butch lesbians, failed completely to treat gender or sexuality in an interesting or entertaining way.

Overall, the show was entertaining enough for me to recommend it, though I have serious reservations, because I think it could have been done better and I feel that it was significantly overpriced for what it was. In the end, I did laugh throughout the show, and that may be enough to to earn it a positive review, though it was by no means brilliant.