Don’t rock the boat, baby

I was prepared for “modern rock songs.” I was ready for “dance with urban elegance.” I was even up for “relevant sketch comedy.” And when the bright and shiny kids, all dolled up in their Liza lashes and Joel Grey bowties, opened the cruise-boat cabaret show with a perky, multipart harmony of the Beatles’ “Help” as if they were a college chorale or Up With People, I kept the smile pasted bright on my face. Inside, I was begging the baby Jesus for sweet relief, but when the press preview audience comprises you, a dude from the Grunion and a lady from the Beachcomber, you need to do your part for the actors’ morale.

But a funny thing happened on the big dinner theater boat. By the time the cast started dancing like zombies for “People Are Strange” (a “modern rock” song that’s deep into its early 40s, unless maybe they were singing the Evanescence version?), I realized this was the most subversive fucking thing I’d ever seen in my benighted little life. Here they were, shiny, harmonic, multipart, puttin’ on a show on a harbor cruise of all godforsaken things, and it was gloriously retarded on purpose.

The Scotch helped, of course. (Duke’s Riverboat, also known as The Grand Romance, has a full bar, and it’s hoped you’ll take advantage.) When the adorably gorgeous Sayaka Miyatani did an accent bit where she pronounces “mental” as “menthol,” the lady from the Beachcomber laughed out loud. (I did not.) But when she harangued another performer, in her charming accent, “You don’t even know you are a racist! ‘I am a hillbilly! From the South!’” I’m afraid I dissolved right into my drink. Then she pretended she was a monkey, for the “Monkey in the Basement” song. Man, these kids are game!

Relevant sketch comedy included anti-capitalist rants (in verse) and a chick doing a monologue about fucking a surfer who was engaged to be married, before breaking into a beautiful throaty dap number (“Back to Black,” by Amy Winehouse, naturally, which may have been the only modern rock song actually from the past decade). Also, a guy with a beard looked sort of like Rick Danko.

A lot of the relevant sketch comedy missed; though it’s certain that everyone involved with Alive Theatre is right-thinking and correct, the political comedy was the dullest and least on-point. A small shout-out to Hillary angrily noted she wasn’t the first “qualified woman candidate,” because we’d had Geraldine Ferraro more than two decades ago—except Ferraro isn’t the best token these days, and in fact Ferraro famously went on and on some weeks ago about how Barack Obama wasn’t qualified and really neither was she.

Shortly after, a pissy feminist take on gender neutrality wasn’t all that sharp or smart, though a gender-neutral “Fever” was hilarious in a shirtless Will Ferrell way, and a Spice Girls tribute with superpowers (karate! Smelling good all the time!) had me happy for the rest of the night.

Cabaret and the dada on which it modeled itself worked with ironic ennui, and The Cabaret: Rock the Boat is awesome when it’s turning Up With People conventions on their surfer-fucking heads.

Sincerity creeps in eventually, and a horridawfulpreachstermaudlin ending about the Iraq War seemed like it was about to turn our Danko clone into Berger from “Hair”—but of course they couldn’t, because 40 Year-Old Virgin had already ironicized “Aquarius.” I guess it didn’t occur to them they could still have used “Ain’t Got No” or “Sodomy,” so they totally kept it sincere, and it sucked.

THE CABARET 2008: ROCK THE BOAT RAINBOW HARBOR DOCK 4 | 200 AQUARIUM WAY (BEHIND P.F. CHANG’S) | LONG BEACH 90803 | COCKTAIL CRUISE THURS-FRI 9PM | $25 | DINNER SAT 8PM | $50 | SUNSET SUN 6PM | $25 | BROWNPAPERTICKETS.COM/EVENT/30052 THROUGH SUN

Tags: alive theatre, cabaret, Long Beach, rock the boat, theatre