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01/23/2019 11:01 PMCharles Busch looks divine on his divan.
It is a sunny January afternoon and the actor-playwright-drag artiste is casually chatting about his upcoming solo show in Milford from his “jungle red” living room in his Greenwich Village apartment.
But the conversation soon goes astray with quick quips, theater stories, and show biz gossip.
Eventually we return on track to the subject at hand: His Native New Yorker show, which will be presented by the Milford Arts Council in association with Pantochino Productions, Inc., at MAC, 40 Railroad Ave. South in downtown Milford, Friday, Jan. 25. Busch considers this his out-of-town try-out before playing at the off-Broadway venue, 54 Below, next month.
In the show Busch tells a comic- yet-poignant tale of his early years in the ’70s striving to find a place for himself in show business. Songs include the work of Michel Legrand, Rupert Holmes, Stephen Sondheim, Jim Croce, and others, accompanied by Busch’s longtime musical director, pianist Tom Judson. Busch will appear sans drag, “but in green paisley suit with rhinestone buttons designed by James Johansmeyer of Milford. It’s at a place where Bruno Mars meets Judy at the Palace.”
“The ’70s ,” says Busch, 64, “was a mixture of the excitement of discovering who I was as a person and as a performer as well as a lot of fear and frustration of what’s to become of me. Will I get past the gatekeepers? Still, I had a rather deranged faith in myself and it never occurred to me that I would not ultimately earn my living in theater.”
And he has: as an actor, playwright, director, novelist, and drag icon of overwrought heroines of a certain age and era. Busch received a Tony Award nomination for his play The Tale of he Allergist’s Wife starring Linda Lavin, which became the longest-running comedy on Broadway in the last 25 years. He is the author and star of more than two dozen plays including The Divine Sister, The Lady in Question, Red Scare on Sunset, Theodora: She-Bitch of Byzantium, The Tribute Artist, and Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, which ran five years off-Broadway. His plays Psycho Beach Party and Die Mommie Die were also made into films.
Prior to his career launch with Vampire Lesbians of Sodom in 1984, Busch tried to break through with solo shows.
“It it was easier to book myself as a solo performer than to get a production of a play,” he says. “But some of the first reviews I got were horrible. I remember being in Chicago at the Victory Garden Theatre and oh-my-God every critic in Chicago from the major papers to the supermarket weeklies had these full-page reviews with these grotesque pictures of me taken by a staff photographer and they all said I had no talent at all. Part of me was devastated but there was this other part of me that thought, ‘Wow, they must think I’m important enough to destroy.’”
As his playwriting career flourished, he continued to dabble in solo performing, but seven years ago he began to pursue it in earnest.
“A year ago we did My Kind of ’60s, about my childhood and adolescence”—which was right out of Auntie Mame.
When he was 12 years old, Busch’s fabulous Manhattan aunt stepped in and rescued him from his Westchester life. His mother died when he was seven and his father was “an adorable, irresponsible, funny, unreliable child himself,” he told me years earlier when we first met. “I was drifting, a screwed-up, lost waif orphan when my aunt swept in, took me to the city with her and taught me how to concentrate. I was practically narcoleptic. Any book or studying it was really painful for me. She taught me to read the front page of The New York Times every day—and that forced me to have some sense of the world beyond my own. Any talent I had, my aunt encouraged. I drew well, so I was sent to nude life classes when I was only a kid. She encouraged every creative instinct I showed and gave me confidence.”
And she took him to show after Broadway show. When he was 16 in 1970, he saw his first solo show. It was by Marlene Dietrich.
“To this day I don’t think there’s been a show where more people had binoculars and opera glasses, because everyone wanted to see her face up close,” he says. “But she was so protective of her image. She was washed in pink light. It was as if she carried her own filter or scrim on stage.
He tells another story of Dietrich.
“My good friend [painter Don Bachardy, who was writer Christopher Isherwood’s longtime partner] met Dietrich at some event and asked her to sit for a portrait. One day his phone rang at his home in Los Angeles and it was Dietrich who said, ‘Can I come over this evening?’ Don said, ‘I have friends over now for chili but come on over.’ She arrives wearing a white silk pantsuit and it appeared she had been at another event and didn’t want to waste a good make-up job. She insisted on serving the meal like a good German hausfrau and after she sat for him and he started drawing her—he saw a fleck of chili on her exquisite suit,
“He told me had never experienced anything like this before, but he told me just as he started to zero in to scrutinize her face to draw, she willed herself out of focus. He just knew that she didn’t want to be observed that closely.”
Busch says the new show takes his life from college to opening night of Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.
“You know, maybe I’ll put them both shows together in a Elaine Stritch kind of show,” he says.
New York Native tickets ($30 or $35 at door) are available at www.milfordarts.org or by calling 203-878-6647 (10 a.m. to 5 p.m.).
Frank Rizzo is a freelance journalist who lives in New Haven and New York City. He has been writing about theater and the arts in Connecticut for nearly 40 years.