photo by Bruce-Michael Gelbert
(left to right) Tim Cusack, Bianca Leigh & William TN Hall
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On July 6 (and 7), at the Cherry Grove Community House, the Arts Project of Cherry Grove presented lovely transsexual chanteuse Bianca Leigh in the Theatre Askew production of her one-woman music theatre piece “Busted, the Musical,” considering in song and speech the night she spent in a New York City jail, the downtown Tombs, an institution that struck fear in people’s hearts, arrested for prostitution. Bianca performed an earlier version of her show here, at Cherry’s, a couple of seasons ago, using recorded tracks. It was a pleasure to hear her tell her tale now, on a stage with a proscenium, without a microphone in hand, and singing with her Musical Director, William TN Hall, at the Yamaha, in the work lovingly directed and developed by Theatre Askew Artistic Director Tim Cusack. Matt Baney and Alison Brackman were responsible for lights and sound.
“How did I become a notorious transsexual dominatrix, run afoul of the law?” Bianca asks rhetorically, as she traces her progress from boyhood in New Jersey and education to prepare her for becoming a Shakespearean actress, to working a daytime job at Macy’s and a nighttime one at Leather Ladies, run by the formidable Fleur—“I’m not a madam, I’m a mistress”—de Lys.
After Will’s snappy overture whets the appetite, Bianca asks, in his song with her lyrics, “What’s a Nice Girl Like Me (doing in a place like this)”—i.e. prison—a Broadway-style lament with a big finish, and recounts her early dream of becoming a movie star in her blockbuster fantasy number “You’ll See What Money Can Buy,” with music by Jeff Domoto.
At Macy’s Bianca meets her first tranny, Miss Claudia Devereaux, who brings her to an affordable plastic surgeon, who starts her on hormones. Her priceless impression of Claudia is just the first of many that Bianca treats us to over the course of the evening. Bianca lands a job dancing at Show World on 42nd Street—it’s not glamorous, but it’s in the theatre district and a stage is a stage is a stage. “I get to dance in a theatre,” she declares. “So what if everybody in the audience is jerking off?” After all, she’s now a “Broadway Shooting Star,” as her upbeat song, with Jeff Whitty and Tim, with music by Super Buddha, tells us.
But there’s “gender apartheid in porn town,” Bianca finds, as the trannies working at Show World get paid after and less than the biological females. So when she meets “tough as nails” Fleur—whom she recognizes from the doctor’s waiting room and who elicits from Bianca another vivid character impression—at the Hellfire club, she accepts work in Fleur’s dungeon, as “an apprentice dominatrix.”
Under Fleur’s aegis, Bianca sells S&M fantasies, not sex, and when obliged to deliver verbal abuse, “I’d slip in a little Shakespeare.” “The money was great” and “I thought of myself as a pioneer of safe sex,” she observes. And when a customer asks bluntly for sex, Bianca creatively explains, becoming Marlene Dietrich in Will’s Kurt Weill-style “Dingo Song,” just what became of her vagina that makes intercourse impossible—remember “A Dingo Ate My Baby?”
Danger lurks, however, when a handsome stranger requests oral sex, and Fleur queries Bianca, “Would it kill to give a blowjob on a very slow day?” Bianca and Will examine the situation in their “Temptation Tango,” which begins casting its spell in searing Spanish style, with a side of “Otchi chornya,” and veers into Gilbert and Sullivan-esque patter for exchanges between Bianca and Fleur. Alas, the comely gentleman turns out to be an undercover police officer and, in dismay, Bianca hears the fateful words “You are under arrest … You’re going to the tombs, you and that other one—you’re busted!” She finds herself “Inside Black Mariah,” the paddy wagon, “chained together with 40 men in the dark,” in a dramatic rendition of Isam Rum and Matty Pritchard’s song. When one of the men offers her his seat, Bianca discovers that “chivalry isn’t dead—it’s in jail!”
Bianca arrives at the Tombs, for her 36-hour incarceration and, echoing Bette Davis, exclaims, “What a dump!” The cuisine, a baloney sandwich and tea, is definitely not haute, but she learns from her tranny sister inmates, whom she ‘does’ with an uncanny knack, that one of the guards, who calls her “Sugar Tits”—in contrast with the one that hollers, “Shut the fuck up, homo!”—likes her, and they urge her to “Work Him,” in her song with Rum and Pritchard, for any special favors, even an extra baloney sandwich, that she can get.
Bianca’s next cellmates are the swaggering “butch queens,” who’ve done time on Rikers Island, and David, a black gay man, with whom she has an acquaintance in common, and who keeps her safe while she sleeps. This leads in to a “dream sequence,” she announces, in “Chase Me,” a gentle reverie written by Taylor Mac, and she recalls, from her youth, the boys chasing the screaming girls—and joining those girls until some budding young “Neanderthal” advises her that it’s her role, as a boy, to chase, not to be chased. Reality returns, with a vengeance, when a heroin addict, in withdrawal and ailing, is thrown in the cell. Bianca asks the guard for a roll of toilet paper for this poor tranny and, in order to obtain it, bargains by, unflinchingly, showing him—and us—her breast, a forceful moment of truth and decidedly not gratuitous nudity.
At last, Bianca is arraigned, her sentence reduced to probation in exchange for promising the judge a discount at Macy’s, and released into the light of day, to behold a “Technicolor” sky and sing a triumphant ode to freedom, “The Lady’s Goin’ Home,” with music by Ellen Maddow and Pritchard, as the work’s heartening grand finale.
Watch for future performances by Bianca Leigh of “Busted, the Musical,” as well as for upcoming productions by Theatre Askew.