By Bart Greenberg***The Village, A Disco Musical!, by Nora Burns (at Dixon Place), is a unique piece, a vivid combination of nostalgia, comedy, dance, period music—and Thornton Wilder. At times highly sophisticated, at other times seemingly amateur. At times 
filled with sentimental longing for a past culture, at other times a contemptuous commentary on that time. At times a broad farce, at other times verging on the tragic. If the production, directed by Adam Pivirotto, never quite merges all these elements into one piece, it is never boring and often quite entertaining and even moving.
Burns acknowledges a great debt to Thornton Wilder and his masterpiece, Our Town, although there is also a great salute to his landmark work, The Skin of Our Teeth, itself a farce, burlesque and satire. Instead of the audience having an ally in the wise-cracking maid from that show, Sabina, we have, as in Our Town, the Stage Manager (Glace Chase), a sardonic character who observes the action from the present day, explaining period elements to the audience, directing the action and mocking the actors on occasion.
The Stage Manager introduces us to the characters/prototypes that dwell in the West Village of 1979: Trade (Antony Cherrie), a young hustler, a mix of a romance and sexual addiction; his sugar daddy Old George (Chuck Blasius, giving the most emotionally rich performance of the evening); Trade’s trick, Steven, determined to transition into becoming his boyfriend (the eager puppy, Ever Chavez); the sort-of drag queen, sort-of trans best friend Petey (Eileen Dover, who knows her way around a Beatrice Arthur wise crack); the druggy-girl-next-door Lisa (Ashley Chavonne, who dances a dream ballet wonderfully); the porn-stud-next door—a different door—Jason (Antwon LeMonte, who brings a good deal of dignity to some really stilted lines straight out of a 1990’s adult video); plus Jock (Valton Jackson) and Cade (Richard Schieffer), as two go-go boys always ready to dance and move props—and take part in an orgy.
Most of the action takes place in the home shared by Trade and Old George, as seemingly the entire world (at least their world) wanders through their apartment, which strangely seems to have multiple doors to multiple hallways and one window. Since the economical set by Steven Hammel is made up mostly of curtains and small platforms, the doors are left to the audience’s imagination, adding to the playful theatricality of the evening. The more flamboyant costumes were provided by Paul Alexander, which definitely helped to define characters.
Thanks to these artists and the writing, the cocoon the play’s population dwells in is well-defined. However, there is a surprising lack of acknowledgment of life outside of the neighborhood, with just a few throwaway lines about “going uptown,” and a glib reference to incoming president, Ronald Reagan. From the standpoint of the audience living in 2022, and a large part of who lived through the 1980s, this lack of reference makes these characters seem somewhat foolish and a bit desperate to keep the party going. (At the performance this reviewer attended, it seemed that half the audience were reliving their youth and the other half were viewing history.)
The nostalgia element was definitely increased by the almost constant use of music curated by Robin Carrigan, at various times used for a scene-setting soundtrack, for social commentary and for story-telling dance. The fine choreography, also by Carrigan, varies from intentionally careless disco dancing to well-developed celebrations of love and even an old-fashioned Rodgers & Hammerstein-genre dream ballet. There is both humor and eroticism in her work.
The final third of the show veered back to Thornton Wilder territory, as the story lurched forward to 1993. At this point, one character, with the encouragement of the Stage Manager, somewhat awkwardly and self-consciously started to paraphrase the final act of Our Town, wherein the heroine, Emily, reaches out to the audience from an afterlife. The problem here is this 
transition is too great a shift from the wisecracking stylized characters of this play into the poetry of Wilder’s heaven; when Emily in Our Town appears after her death, it’s consistent within the reality and expectations of the mundane New Englanders of that drama. This finale in The Village, A Disco Musical! might be made to work, but it needs more directorial refinement before it can achieve the playwright’s goals.
The sold-out audience certainly enjoyed the production. The problems can certainly be fixed both by time (the cast has yet to merge together as a whole, with more finely integrated acting styles) and a more developed, reasoned shift to the very different final third part of the work. Overall, The Village, A Disco Musical! is a fascinating and whimsical view of a very specific time and place with a collection of fascinating characters.
The Village, A Disco Musical! runs through Oct. 22 at Dixon Place, 161A Chrystie St., NYC.
Tickets are available in advance from https://ci.ovationtix.com/35526/production/1137468 or at the door. For more information, go to http://dixonplace.org/performances/the-village-a-disco-musical/.
Photos by Eric McNatt
