Moon Over Barrow Street

Never mind the devil: Tiger Lily made Charles Busch do it! Yes, Sondra Lee, the petite dynamo who starred opposite Mary Martin in Broadway’s Peter Pan, is largely responsible for the fact that Busch’s 1999 play Shanghai Moon is now being revived by the Drama Dept. at the Greenwich House Theater, 27 Barrow Street. A spoof of Asian melodramas, Moon puts Busch back in drag as Lady Sylvia Allington, an American-born British diplomat’s wife who has a scandalous affair with an Asian warlord (played by Tony Award winner B.D. Wong).

“Sondra is an old friend,” says Busch as we chat in a dressing room at Greenwich House. “She saw the play when we did it at Theatre for the New City and loved it. Since then, she’s talked about producing it in London; it’s been a great fantasy of mine to act there, so that really kept my enthusiasm up about the play. Then, last year, I ran into Douglas Carter Beane [artistic director of Drama Dept.] and he suggested doing a reading. We did and it was marvelous, especially because of B.D. It doesn’t hurt that the most famous Asian actor in American theater is part of their company. He found so many colors in the part — and he’s also sexy as hell.” (Apparently, Wong can keep a secret: He won’t tell Busch any plot points from the final season of OZ, in which Wong is featured and in which Busch co-starred for a season.)

Busch readily admits that he never expected a second life for Shanghai Moon. “I originally wrote the play very fast and purposely did this shoestring-budget production at TNC,” he says. “Frankly, the whole thing was more therapy than career move; I had spent the few years before that trying to experiment with my range. I had written myself a male role in You Should Be So Lucky and had done Queen Amarantha, which was a much more serious piece. Carl Andress, my friend and director, finally said to me, ‘Charles, go back and do what you do best. Have fun, write yourself a big grande dame part.'” That said, Lady Sylvia is a little different from other Buschian femme fatales. “She’s a bit trashier than my usual ladies,” he says. “Usually, the veneer of gentility is a bit more calcified. But she also reminds me of an Ibsen heroine,” he adds, half seriously: “She has hidden secrets, lives in a climate of sexual hypocrisy, and is trapped in a loveless marriage.”

Unlike some of Busch’s better-known vehicles, such as Psycho Beach Party or Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, Moon is based on a rather obscure film genre. “I think that only the most insane devotees of film would actually know the movies I used, like The Cheat or Wild Orchid,” the author remarks. “But I still wanted the piece to be very accurate. For one thing, my lover [author Eric Myers] is a film historian and he’ll know if I’m cheating. But I also believe that, even if an audience doesn’t know the actual movies, they will know whether the play is being done accurately or falsely.”

While some of the cast and most of the designers of the 1999 production are involved again, there are three main cast additions: Wong, Drama Dept. member Becky Ann Baker, and Broadway veteran Daniel Gerroll as Busch’s husband, Lord Allington. “I’m not sure how Danny got involved, since he’s not a Drama Dept. member, either,” says Busch. “But I was thrilled when someone suggested casting him. I wonder if he knows what he’s gotten into. I don’t even know if he’s ever seen me on stage — and he won’t see me in drag until our dress rehearsal.”

Moon is just one course on Busch’s very busy plate. Later this month, Busch will make an overnight trip to the Sundance Film Festival for a screening of Die, Mommy, Die!, a film he wrote and in which he stars alongside Frances Conroy, Philip Baker Hall, Natasha Lyonne, and Jason Priestley (as Busch’s lover). Helmed by stage director Mark Rucker, the film is still seeking a distributor. “It’s the closest thing to one of my stage plays, so if people don’t like it, I should probably just retire,” Busch says with a laugh. (Indeed, a stage version of the piece had a run at the Coast Playhouse in Los Angeles in 1999.) “It’s a Dead Ringers-type story crossed with the Oresteia. Usually, I find acting on screen frustrating because of the smallness of my parts; but when you play the lead, it’s really exciting. We shot my scenes three ways: underplayed, big, and really over-the-top. It was a challenge to try to maintain my stage persona on film without being grotesque, and I think I got it. There are even some scenes where I think we could’ve gone bigger!”

Once Shanghai Moon closes, Busch will have two major projects to concentrate on. In June, the Pasadena Playhouse will present a rare revival of the Truman Capote-Harold Arlen musical House of Flowers with a new book by Busch and Kenneth Elliott. The pair began work on the project about 10 years ago for a touring production with Patti LaBelle, and Busch is thrilled to see it come around again –though he’d admittedly be happier if City Center Encores! wasn’t going to offer its own staged concert of the show in February. Busch is also working on the book for the Broadway-bound Taboo — the musical about British music legend Leigh Bowery written by Boy George, to be produced here by Rosie O’Donnell. “It will have very little resemblance to the London production,” Busch says. “We’re putting in some new characters and Boy George is writing some new songs.”

While he is content to have Shanghai Moon done Off-Broadway (“I didn’t want a slick production”), Busch will be happy to be back on the Great White Way, where his comedy The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife racked up a two-year-run and earned him a Tony nomination for Best Play. The show is currently in the midst of a successful nationwide tour starring Valerie Harper. “I feel very vindicated,” he says of its success. “Invariably, some old lady would come up to me and say ‘aren’t you concerned that this play will be too New York Jewish for the rest of the country.’ But I always believed that its intrinsic humanity would reach audiences everywhere. And it’s not like we were performing the play in Yiddish!”

Busch gives a lot of credit to Harper, with whom he bonded after she took over the lead on Broadway from his good friend Linda Lavin. “I know a lot of people are going not to see the play, but to see Rhoda live,” he notes. “Valerie’s an interesting sort of celebrity. Because of Rhoda, she’s become a comfort to people, like she’s their best friend. And I think that’s especially important in the aftermath of September 11.” So is making us laugh — something that Charles Busch never fails to do.