Lamb Chops: Silence! The Musical (Review)
Enjoy a nice chianti while you take in Studio's wildly funny Silence of the Lambs spoof
While not a part of this month’s Capital Fringe Festival, Studio is certainly appealing to the anything-goes audience with its latest production. Silence! The Musical (
) is about as wild and whacked out as a professional show ever gets.
Perhaps you’ve heard the buzz about Jon Kaplan and Alan Kaplan’s musical, with a book by Hunter Bell. Yes, this is that show, “the unauthorized parody” of the 24-year-old cinematic classic The Silence of the Lambs. Silence! is a fringe show down to its roots, having emerged as the breakout hit of the 2005 FringeNYC Festival. It strips away the film’s focus on horror, replacing it with nutty, off-kilter, sexualized humor.
Four years ago the show ran off Broadway in a two-hour, two-act production that the New York Times said was “stretched well past the point of inspiration.” That’s not the case at Studio, where director Alan Paul has trimmed the fat into a lean, 90-minute, intermission-less show, set in Studio’s intimate upper-level Stage 4 space — featuring a full bar. By the time you’ve just about had your fill of the lewd sight gags, uproariously perverse rounds of dialogue and gleefully vulgar songs, it’s all said and done.
Laura Jordan earns the biggest applause for her deadpan work in the tricky role of Clarice Starling, the aspiring FBI agent and “West Virginia hick” with a comically exaggerated lisp. Tally Sessions is similarly jovial in his portrayal of an attractive, almost likeable Hannibal Lecter — things you’d never say about Anthony Hopkins’s cinematic monster. Even Tom Story manages to make Buffalo Bill a more multi-dimensional character than the film’s one-note transgressive transsexual. But it is Hayley Travers who steals the show in her dual role as little Catherine trapped in Bill’s well and as Catherine’s mother, U.S. Senator Ruth Martin. Her scenes are short but indelible — this mother and daughter are effectively portrayed as cut from the same cheap but sturdy T.J. Maxx cloth.
Even more fleeting are the ensemble adorned with white ears and hoofs, gamboling around the stage and into the crowd. These little lambs will make you laugh and smile, and then laugh some more. –Doug Rule
Silence! The Musical runs to Aug. 9 at Studio Theatre, 14th and P Streets NW. Tickets are $40 to $45. Call 202-332-3300 or visit studiotheatre.org.
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