Hexing Hitler
Rating: 5
Hexing Hitler
KC Fringe Festival
Add Hexing Hitler to your list of must-see shows at this year's Fringe Festival. Penned and directed by Bryan Colley and Tara Varney, the team who brought last year's super successful KHAAAAAN! the Musical, to the Off Center stage, this year's offering is darker and more compelling.. I expect I will think for some time about this show, which was inspired by a photo essay in Life magazine. The setting is a cabin in the Maryland woods populated by the photographer, plus William Seabrook, a Depression-era, true-life, Indiana Jones-style author and adventurer, along with his narcissistic friend, Dickey, and their ladies -- a ditsy socialite and heiress to Birdseye food bucks, and Seabrook's clever, plain spoken, pregnant girlfriend.
All the actors believably inhabit the nervous, brink-of-war era of 1941. but performance honors belong to the women. Melody Butler is delicious as Ruth Birdseye, the screaming, laughing, drinking, stumbling Paris Hilton of her day. Whether she is frivolously prancing and posing, or seriously conjuring, Butler charismatically draws focus to her and her alone. Sarah Mae Lamar's best moments as Constance are before and after the dervish Butler comes and goes. Constance loves the wayward Seabrook, disapproves of his drinking, and has her own reasons for hating Hitler. Lamar doesn't make as much noise as Butler, but she is an intense and powerful presence, not only in what she says, but also in what goes unsaid.
The crew dress a mannequin as Hitler and proceed to curse, shake, slap, stab. twice behead, burn and bury him Besides Jamaican rum, the essential element for the project to succeed is the photographer. Seabrook explains that Hitler must see the photos and believe his was cursed in order for the hex to work its psychological damage. Both Hitler and Seabrook end up soundly cursed by evening's end. Do such things work? The program explains that both men committed suicide in close chronological proximity.
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