This Ain’t No Disco – Linda Gross Theatre, New York

Theo Stockman and Peter LaPrade in This Ain’t No Disco at the Linda Gross Theatre, New York. Picture: Ben Arons

This Ain’t No Disco continues at the Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater until 12 August 2018.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

Studio 54 lives again in all its infamy in This Ain’t No Disco, a tremendously ambitious but finally dispiriting Off-Broadway musical, or, as it defines itself, “rock opera”.

The creative team has notable credentials. The score and orchestrations are by Stephen Trask and Peter Yanowitz; Trask is the creator and composer of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, celebrated both Off-Broadway and on as well as on film. Songwriter Yanowitz was the drummer for Hedwig’s Broadway incarnation. The two also collaborated on Disco’s book along with Rick Elice, a co-writer of Jersey Boys.

Staging the production is Darko Tresnjak, an adventurous director who has scored with more conventional fare as well, such as Broadway’s 2014 Tony Awardee for Best Musical, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, and the currently running Anastasia.

Set in 1979/1980 New York, the show bravely attempts to present a montage of a culture of celebrities, artists and strivers caught up in chaotic glamour, with the legendary disco as its fulcrum. The ample score is often arresting. It sets some fetching melodies against rock or disco beats, and it’s played with power by the off-stage band of six musicians, conducted by Darius Smith and including Trask, on keyboard, guitar and synthesiser, and Yanowitz on drums and percussion.

However, some of the major characters delivering those songs on stage are so repugnant – satirical as they may be – your dislike for them begins to ooze over the music as well. It even spreads to the hard-working chorus, energetically singing and gyrating through Camille A. Brown’s frenzied but oddly joyless choreography.

The characters include Studio 54’s co-owner and self-appointed major-domo, Steve Rubell, who decides who can and cannot enter his exalted domain, while outside the door supplicants cry “Let Us In”, and even more to the point, “Let Us Sin”.

Rubell is played to the obnoxious hilt by Theo Stockman, emitting a drugged-up, toxic snake-like aura and masterfully avoiding any hint of a redeeming feature.

Equally repellent is the gabby, grasping, hard-edged publicist, Binky, hunting the disco’s capaciousness for an artist or artist wannabe she can promote into the next big thing. And like Stockman with Rubell, you can credit Chilina Kennedy with an expert performance.

Not as loquacious but definitely weirder is the splinter of a figure identified only as The Artist, a terse talker and constrained walker who with his strange blond wig and dark glasses is obviously Andy Warhol, or someone very much like Andy Warhol. Will Connolly renders an effective-enough impersonation. He also gets to deliver the 11 o’clock number, after Studio 54 is shut down with Rubell’s conviction for tax evasion. Connolly sings it with fervour, filling us in on The Artist’s background and telling us that “life is suffering, life is pain…but we gotta move, gotta move on”. But it’s hard to take words of inspiration from so off-putting a persona.

Capping off the deplorables are the corrupt district attorney (Eddie Cooper) who hopes to use his conviction of Rubell for political gain, and the D.A.’s officious assistant (Trevor McQueen).

Meanwhile, the characters we’re supposed to root for and those who inhabit the major rickety plotline come across as not much more than constructs of the authors. They are Chad, a gay busboy at the disco who’s been kicked out of his affluent home by his anti-gay father, and Sammy, a coffee shop waitress and a devoted single mother whose young son was fathered by her mother’s second husband.

Chad’s fortunes suddenly change when his father dies and he inherits money, allowing a switch from Studio 54 busboy to a golden-clad patron. With Chad’s assistance, Sammy is also able to enter the disco after constant rejection. It seems that Sammy and Chad went to the same high school and even appeared in the same production there of The King and I, where Sammy was nice to the shy gay kid.

An unconvincing soul-mate type of affair develops, but it’s torn asunder when publicist Binky gets her claws into Chad. She senses his artistic aspirations (he’s painted his high-top shoes) and fosters them by using up his inheritance for a publicity-generating wedding ceremony between herself and Chad, a ceremony combined with art exhibition to be held at Studio 54. But when a mishap occurs on one of Chad’s pieces of art, Chad realises how fake everything is and he dashes distraught into the night, signalling a welcome intermission.

In the Act II, Sammy’s fortunes ebb and flow. The Artist has seen in her the makings of a superstar vocalist, and under his guidance, her career takes off, but not before her interior demons cause her to almost die from an overdose. That happens just before she’s supposed to give a performance at another disco known as The Mudd Club, presumably dragged into the proceedings to show us a lower-class version of disco life.

Anyway, Sammy does recover, and in the end, her career has happily resumed, and she, Chad and her little son are all happily cohabiting a New York loft apartment. Living with them are the supportive and cheery lesbian couple who work the coat-check at Studio 54 and together create oddball sculptures.

As Chad and Sammy, Peter LaPrade and Samantha Marie Ware give totally earnest performances and handily negotiate the rock style demands of the score. Still, they can’t really generate much empathy for the characters, whose turns of fate seem carelessly manufactured but still cause them to wallow in self-pity through several extended arias. “I’m a loser with nothing left to lose,” Chad sings at one point.

As for the lesbian couple, they’re played gingerly by Krystina Alabado and Lulu Fall. While they seem pretty extraneous, they have a couple of the score’s catchier numbers, ‘Baryshnikov’s Coat’, in which they describe the various articles that the celebrities have checked, and a bright love song, ‘The Best Part of the Night (is going home with you)’.

The show is graced with a lavish physical production. Jason Sherwood’s colourful set, vividly lit by Ben Stanton, uses shifting platforms, spiral staircases, and patches of light with logos and other signs, transporting us easily to the expansive spaces and various nooks and crannies of the hallowed club, as well as vignettes of other locales.

Sarah Laux’s costumes capture the glitz, giddiness and ugliness of the disco years. Unfortunately, it’s an ugliness that the show throughout, with all its obvious artistry, tends to overemphasise, often to its detriment.

There’s nothing to suggest the sense of genuine high and release that a visit to Studio could engender, along with its invitation to depravity. As its title suggests, very little about This Ain’t No Disco makes you want to hit the dance floor.

Ron Cohen