Macao: Spice without food

In the basic plot line of those noir films of the late ’40s and early ’50s, an expatriate American in a trenchcoat and a sexy chanteuse in a slinky dress were invariably stranded in some murky foreign port, where they found themselves at the mercy of various inscrutable Orientals (as Asians were known before the dawn of political correctness). The genre has been dead for half a century, but now Christopher Durang dissects and spoofs its every conceivable aspect. Why kick this dead horse? Good question. Once you realize that Adrift in Macao is a one-joke vehicle with no larger point— say, in the first minute, when a call for a “rickshaw” produces a character named “Rick Shaw”— you know you’re in for a long evening’s diet that’s all salt and no food. What might have worked as a ten-minute skit for “Saturday Night Live” is here stretched out to 90 minutes of overdone, self-congratulatory potshots at easy and irrelevant targets. Durang seems to have forgotten that comedy works best when it teases the currently powerful: Airplane satirized much more than those Airport disaster films, and Gilbert & Sullivan’s comedies satirized the manners and mores of their own Victorian audiences. Absent that sort of dramatic tension or engaging characters, it takes a larger-than-life performer to salvage such a comedy— someone like the awesome Sara Ramirez as the Lady of the Lake in the current Broadway production of Spamalot. But the lack of that kind of focus leaves Macao’s merely competent cast, lyrics and songs every bit as adrift as any rolling stone who ever sought refuge in Macao.—DAN ROTTENBERG

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