by John F. Karr
Bay Area Reporter
May 28, 1998

The Kinsey Sicks have a new show, and it's a doozy.

The a cappella drag queen quartet, which sharply lampoons gay life with original compositions and parody versions of pop songs, is composed of four guys who don elaborate drag, exaggerate their gay and Jewish identities, and sing with impeccable musicianship. They are Jerry Friedman as Vaselina (the big one), Irwin Keller as Winnie (such a shande, who'll marry her?), Maurice Kelly as Trixie (Dolores Gray with muscles), and Ben Schatz as Rachel (the zaftig debutante).

For a group that spends much of the evening dishing out scat jokes and cocksucking songs and an endless variety of sexual insouciance, for a group that is so deliciously and determinedly low-brow, The Kinsey Sicks sure are sophisticated. Truth is that the entirety of their lowbrow pose, in which they deliver heaps of guffaws throughout their evening-length, two-act revue, is merely a devious cover for their perversely highbrow sensibilities.

Which other group, I ask you, uses Ionesco's The Bald Soprano as a jumping-off place? That play, which initiated the style known as Theatre of the Absurd, lampooned the banalities of suburban life. In the new show, that classic play becomes The Balled Sopranos: At Home with the Kinsey Sicks. Refracting Ionesco's absurd familial setting, the Sicks satirize gay life with songs and lead-in skits on a freewheeling variety of community-oriented topics. These include a meeting of The Society to Protect Endangered Feces ("We've made a load of difference"); a literary salon which strangely becomes a defense of big hair; and, naturally, a Tupperware party, which culminates in a tribute to our sisterfags, "Baby Dyke" (from the Supremes' "Baby Love").

The show's second half reels in a similarly off-the-wall fashion throughout history, and includes a madrigal about golden showers, a touching Yiddish folktune (don't ask!), and the "lesbian" duet from the opera Lakme. Vocal virtuosity is much on display -- I savored Winnie's carillon imitation in "Where the Goys Are," and especially the entire group's imitation of a klezmer band.

Creating their scenes through improv ensures the group's quantum leaps into the illogical, while retaining a coherent whole. The wild air of spontaneity in the boy's comedy is only slightly let down when they finally reach a song. The all-out presentation of the scenes contrasts sharply with the careful precision of the songs, and greater camouflage of the momentary break between speech and song would be an achievement. But this is minor, and hardly disrupts the audience's wholehearted enjoyment.

What the group does, without fail or let-up, is to dish out an elusive commodity that is my very favorite thing in entertainment: The Kinsey Sicks are a constant surprise.