'Beauty Pageant' Spoofs American Icon

By Sylvie Drake
TIMES THEATER CRITIC
7/20/92

There's no mistaking "The Miss Vagina Beauty Pageant" at the Coast Playhouse for anything but what it is: a noisy send-up of those blithely inane beauty contests a la Miss Universe, rattling unperturbed through the rapidly ending 20th Century in pre-World War II mode. Its contestants are blank objects of sex and domesticity invented and defined by men.

But when the program for such a show acknowledges "Thanks lots to ... our moms ..." and the producing company's called A Smell My Productions/Soloway Sisters Thing (our italics), you know that under the squeals, the junk food, the outlandish imagery, the satire's going to be benign.

Heck, yes. Gross, sloppy, out there, yet with more going on than deafens the ear. Jill and Faith Soloway, the sisters behind this spoof, are the same ones who created "The Real Live Brady Bunch" playing in Westwood. "Pageant" is as wild and as broadly good-natured as the Westwood show, if a good deal more raw.

Discipline is not its thing, despite disciplined Faith Soloway at the synthesizer giddily pacing the moves, and Becky Thyre (hilarious as Marcia in "Brady Bunch") reinventing herself here as buxom Miss Trinidad and Tobago.

Her partners in raunch and rowdiness: Beth Cahill (a butch Miss South Side of Chicago), Kate Flannery (twitchy Miss Pennsylvania, the one with the floppy arms), Melanie Hutsell (fruit-addicted Miss Tennessee), Susan Messing (a weird Miss New York) and Madeleine Long as last year's Miss V., now overdosing on Twinkies.

"Pageant" goes after specific targets but with mostly blunt instruments. Its scatology is infantile. In that sense, it is very much a work in progress, with cast members still cracking up at their own jokes on stage. But how much does it matter and does anyone care?

Not much. That 12:30 a.m. performance slot on Fridays and Saturdays is no accident. It forgives a lot. Like that other late-night sub culture hit, "The Rocky Horror Show," "Pageant" is looking for its groupies and devotees. And to judge from the whoops and hollers of Monday's 8 p.m. audience, it may already have found them.

"The Miss Vagina Pageant," Coast Playhouse, 8325 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood. Sundays, 9p.m.; Mondays, 8 p.m.; Fridays-Saturdays, 12:30 a.m. Ends July 27. $8;(213) 660-8587. Running time- 1hour, 15 minutes.