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Boy George's 'Taboo' an earnestly empty affair
From London, the overwrought musical of '80s club culture.
By Howard Shapiro
Inquirer Staff Writer

NEW YORK - Taboo has everything but a soul. It has Boy George in a musical story about the life of Boy George, composed, scored and partly conceived by Boy George. It has a thorough rewrite from its London original by American actor and playwright Charles Busch.

It has a reported $10 million bankroll by Rosie O'Donnell, who has done genuine good deeds for Broadway, although this is not one of them.

And, oh, does it have passion. If you could order passion from a menu and you wanted no accompaniments - nothing to explain it or allow you to be tantalized by it and sucked into it - then Taboo would be your perfect restaurant.

Taboo also has characters who inhabit the Plymouth Theatre stage in lavish, clever costumes by Mike Nicholls and Bobby Pearce, and feel horrible about themselves through two entire acts. They are a part of the '80s club scene in London, a frenetic mixture of free spirits, cross-dressers, gays, straights and druggies - the milieu from which Boy George and his popular Culture Club band emerged and then accessorized the pop scene.

These characters sing about how their lives are fiascos, about wearing too much makeup, and about whether you run and hide when you're alone at night. (Why they ask this, we do not know.) They sing well, even beautifully, during searing emotional peaks that erupt, sometimes with little explanation.

Taboo's overwrought qualities carry the air of high opera, but without great music; a lot of the songs seem derivative, crisscrossing timeworn theater orchestration and rock, and doing neither justice. The music reaches a higher level too late, approaching the finale when, one by one, the main characters have short, tour-de-force face time. It's like a jazz show, in which each musician gets a personal riff.

The show's book is a study in unexplained paradox. Big Sue, a club scene doyenne (a robust, endearing performance by Liz McCartney), admires a girl named Nicola (Sarah Uriarte Berry) and gets her entree to a picky club. A scene or two later, the two women despise each other. Boy George wants fame, wants his cross-dressing to be acceptable, wants true love. He gets it all, and rejects it with nastiness, self-defeat and ultimately, heroin. ("The Fame Game," exploring this, is a notable number. It actually illuminates the plot.)

It's tough to appreciate a book and songs that give you the essence but no meat. This is especially dispiriting because Taboo comes off as trite, yet a rise to stardom and descent into self-pity could have triggered meaningful theater.

Instead, we get more and louder emotion as the play winds into the night. People yell or smack or gay-bash. Over 10 minutes' time, three incendiary people are ejected from three houses. I fought back the urge to wish that I were the fourth, because the ensemble is genuinely talented. Boy George himself - George O'Dowd - has grown bulky in his 40s and bounds around the stage gleefully playing Leigh Bowery, the elephantine real-life London fashion designer and club-hopper who died of AIDS in 1994.

Raúl Esparza performs an overdone but likable narrator, Philip. Cary Shields, chiseled and hunky and full-voiced, is George's sexually confounded lover, and Jeffrey Carlson makes a dandy female impersonator.

The actor who keeps Taboo as honest as possible is the eerily Boy-Georgish Euan Morton, who manages to be convincing in a show that eschews such practice. He has Boy George down so well, you could swear he's the genuine article, even though the Genuine Article is sometimes onstage beside him. Morton has a lovely voice, and in his deep red lipstick and flowing hairdo by Christine Bateman, he looks positively Italianate, something out of a cameo.

At the end, most of these characters come together for a photo shoot at the long-gone Club Taboo, scene of their exploits. They've wrangled and snapped at one another for two acts. Suddenly, they are reconciled, and sing about lifting your head high. It's the final piece of pure hokum, a "Kumbaya" moment. The only rational response: Oh Lord, oh Lord.

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