‘Xanadu’ serves up light, fluffy fun

By Marcus Crowder
mcrowder@sacbee

Published: Thursday, Dec. 31, 2009 – 3:15 pm

Forget knowing Douglas Carter Beane as a masterfully funny and insightful playwright. After seeing the gloriously goofy and entertaining “Xanadu,” Beane will be forever recognized as a master of salvage and reclamation.

He’s taken a lead balloon of a movie, borne in an aesthetically suspect era, and transformed it into an airy, winking, musical theater treat.

The source material is an insipid 1980 Hollywood clunker, starring Olivia Newton-John, designed to duplicate her unprecedented success in “Grease” two years earlier.

Alas and alack, the movie’s ridiculous premise (a Greek muse comes alive to inspire an unsuccessful painter to create a nightclub) couldn’t even gain traction in the cultural wasteland of its own time.

Somehow, Beane has taken that curious potpourri of ’80s fads – leg warmers, roller skating, Venice Beach and the Electric Light Orchestra – and made delicious entertainment hash. In so doing he’s dramatically altered the movie’s main plot and added his own secondary action, giving the musical a slight dramatic nudge.

Mainly, Beane has made the piece terrifically funny through unpretentious self-awareness and gleeful mockery of its origins. The ’80s and the state of musical theater is described thusly: “Creativity shall remain stymied for decades. The theater? They’ll just take some stinkeroo movie or some songwriter’s catalog, throw it onstage and call it a show.”

Pulling it together are the clever lead performances by a charming Elizabeth Stanley as the Greek demi-goddess Clio, come to Earth as Kira, and a tongue-in-cheek Max Von Essen as the struggling artist Sonny. Both are powerful, big-voiced vocalists who command the tuneful pop rock score. Stanley skates, sings, and pulls off Kira’s incredibly cheesy Australian accent. Von Essen, well known to Music Circus audiences, most recently in “Sweeney Todd,” not only rocks the short shorts but makes his silly painter fairly likable.

They’re strongly supported by Larry Marshall as both the businessman Danny and the god Zeus, Clio’s not-too-happy dad. Clio has made the mistake of falling in love with a mortal. Helping Clio’s untimely demise are her jealous sisters Calliope (Annie Golden) and Melpomene (Amy Goldberger in the role usually played by Natasha Yvette Williams). Golden and Goldberger literally chewed the scenery on their signature tune, ELO’s “Evil Woman.”

There’s also a handful of other memorable songs by ELO mastermind Jeff Lynne and songwriter John Farrar, which pep up the thin story. Lynne’s songs include “I’m Alive,” the infectious “Strange Magic” and the title song. Erik Stern wrote the agreeable musical arrangements. Dan Knechtges’ clever choreography simply adds to the hilarity.

Director Christopher Ashley keeps the 90-minute, one-act show skipping along; even so it doesn’t end a moment too soon. Any longer and it would have fallen in on itself, but instead “Xanadu” happily floats away as a light and fluffy thing.