![]() When I first started drag I wasn't this shy young man but a powerful woman. He has said, "Drag is being more, more than you can be. In his plays, Busch usually played the leading lady in drag. While at the university, Busch had difficulty being cast in plays and began to write his own material, which succeeded in drawing interest on campus. He majored in drama at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois and received his B.A. īusch attended The High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. Busch was intensely interested in films as a young child, especially those with female leads from the 30s and 40s. Busch's aunt, Lillian Blum, his mother's oldest sister and a former teacher, brought him to live in Manhattan after the death of his mother. He has two older sisters: Meg Busch, who used to be a producer of promotional spots for Showtime, and Betsy Busch, a textile designer. His father, who wanted to be an opera singer, owned a record store. He is the Jewish son of Gertrude (née Young) and Benjamin Busch. His best known play is The Tale of the Allergist's Wife (2000), which was a success on Broadway.īusch was born in 1954 and grew up in Hartsdale, New York. He also wrote for television and began to act in films and on television in the late 1990s. ![]() He wrote and starred in his early plays Off-off-Broadway beginning in 1978, generally in drag roles, and also acted in the works of other playwrights. Even so, if “You Should Be So Lucky” doesn’t hit the screwball jackpot, it has some fun trying.Charles Louis Busch (born August 23, 1954) is an American actor, screenwriter, playwright and drag queen, known for his appearances on stage in his own camp style plays and in film and television. Kenneth Elliott’s steady direction doesn’t have the same power, floundering when the play does (particularly during the uninspired “Oprah” takeoff that suffers from length and an amateurish performance by Jennifer Kato as the manipulative host). ![]() It’s Campbell, though, too long absent from the New York stage, who gives this comedy a much-needed sense of the outrageous, bolstering even so-so jokes with the sheer force of personality. Arkin and Pearlman do as well as can be expected with their less showy characters. Halston bites into her role with gusto, even if the effect is lessened by the familiarity of a character who wouldn’t be out of place on a “Saturday Night Live” Coffee Talk skit. Still, the jokes hit as often as they miss, perhaps more so, and despite lurking sitcom indulgences (a reference to assets inevitably leads to the rejoinder “You’re sitting on one”), Busch can read a line like “Darling, I am a man, I really am” with just the right flair. The audience will see where the action’s headed long before Christopher does, and the play’s patness is seldom relieved by irony. Through it all, Rosenberg’s ghost, visible only to Christopher and the audience, guides Christopher to victory and self-worth. She’s forever encouraging her underachieving brother to grab hold of life, never more so than when Rosenberg dies of heart failure during electrolysis and leaves his new friend $ 10 million.Įnter Lenore (Halston), Rosenberg’s estranged daughter, a stereotypical gold-chained Jewish princess from Scarsdale who says of her late father, “In the department store of his heart, there was no merchandise.” She wages war, both legal and verbal, against the timid Christopher, landing both of them on an “Oprah”-like show. The old man takes a liking to the odd recluse, arranging a Cinderella-like night on the town during which Christopher meets the potential man of his dreams, a neurotic but doting publicist named Walter (Matthew Arkin).Īlso filling Christopher’s baroquely decorated and tiny apartment is his sister, Polly (Campbell in a nearly play-stealing turn), an actressy actress whose melodramatic sense of style has her affecting an arch British accent despite her Albuquerque origins. Rosenberg (Stephen Pearlman), a recent widower no less lonely for his millions. “Lucky” plays best when cast members Nell Campbell and Julie Halston square off in the type of broad caricature that marked such Busch classics as “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom” and “Psycho Beach Party.” Those moments are just this side of infrequent, enough so to account for the play’s peculiar listlessness.īusch plays Christopher, a morbidly shy West Village electrologist who befriends an elderly client named Mr. In fact, the play itself is a trifle, often flat and phony-sentimental, but peppered with bright moments. This time out, the boulevard gets the better of the camp.
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