A Night in Vegas
Full-frontal male nudity and forced humor are the primary ingredients of Joe Marshall's gay male sex comedy.
(© Paul Crispin Quitoriano)
The first scene concerns long-term lovers Ted (Nicholas Pierro) and Steven (Kelly Riley), whose weekend getaway is interrupted by a male prostitute (Joe Fanelli), a corpse that doesn't seem to want to stay dead (Denis Hawkins), and a couple of not-so-helpful hotel employees (Edy Escamilla and Chris von Hoffmann). There are a few actually funny bits in this piece, mostly involving the stashing away of the "dead" body in different locations, but the acting is so bad that it drains much of the humor from the proceedings.
The next scene attempts a more serious tone, as Andrew (Jason Romas) and Rick (Drew Stark) come back to the latter's hotel room for what at first seems a casual hook-up, but ends up a lot more personally revealing than either had intended. Stark has a quiet, understated delivery that gives substance to the monologue in which he talks about his fears surrounding HIV infection, but the speech -- and the scene as a whole -- comes across as overly simplistic and somewhat labored.
Marshall's writing hits a low point with the third scenario, in which Marc (von Hoffmann), who is deaf, and Tom (Hawkins), who is blind, are left together in the hotel room after their respective boyfriends go down to retrieve some luggage. The numerous jokes regarding the characters' disabilities are woefully misconceived and not very funny.
As the sole female in the cast, Ali Grieb doesn't make a very favorable impression as Helen, the mother of a gay son who has invited her to his wedding. Part of the problem is that the bulk of her dialogue is made up of phone calls in which we only hear Helen's end of the conversation, and the actress isn't able to pull them off convincingly. Bill Purdy, as Helen's husband Jack, fares better, but is underutilized.