Satire is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. “Trey Parker’s Cannibal!” is just that – satire.
What could be labeled a double spoof opened last weekend at the Durango Arts Center and runs through Sunday. First, “Cannibal!” rests on a quirky interpretation of a true Western tragedy. Second, and more importantly, the work fiddles with just about every trope in American musical theater.
In two hours, the company sprints through a fast-moving, often silly, and ultimately surprising production. Jenny Fitts-Reynolds directs, capturing the high-spirited hybrid with lots of self-referential humor. Ably supported by music director Kathryn Canale, choreographer Lilia Reynolds and the whole creative team, Fitts-Reynolds takes Parker’s offbeat reworking of a Colorado calamity and spins it through a musical-comedy colander.
None of the publicity leads you to that conclusion. So last weekend’s energetic matinee by the Durango Arts Repertory Theatre took me by surprise. Parker’s musical sends up stock Western storytelling by delivering a naive hero, a smart ingenue, several villains, a mountain trek, a disaster, a trial and a hanging. Parker threads plot points through comic sketches, sight gags, word play, songs and various dance numbers including a dream ballet between Packer and his horse – a puppet, a truncated tap dance and a chorus line. As a cheeky bonus, Parker employs quotations from English literature and historical musicals like “Oklahoma.”
Stylistically, it’s a mish-mash, part melodrama or a revue – not unlike the equally offbeat “The Musical about Musicals,” a scruffy combination of every trope you’ve ever heard or seen, beginning with those listed above.
The story line depends on Packer (the marvelously innocent and bewildered Jason Lythgoe) and Denver Post journalist Polly Pry (the winning Alyssa Burnett), the raconteur and the witness with the standard bonus of a love story. The 10-actor ensemble works like well-oiled wagon wheels, especially Primrose Bloom and Alex Hinkle who each play five different roles. Hinkle’s grizzled treks across stage as the Doomed Man add another trope to the canon.
Scenes tumble one after another in inventive ways, and Fitts Reynolds often sends the actors into the audience, most notably to jump over the apron as if it were the steep edge of the Green River. Dramatic action follows as the actors symbolically spin through the water and the audience. Packer wanders into the audience in desperate search for food only to end up back at camp on stage and a grisly discovery. It, too, turns tragedy into comedy thanks to our familiarity with another genre: horror movies. You have to see it to believe it.
“Trey Parker’s Cannibal!” took me by surprise. I didn’t expect to enjoy it, but Fitts Reynolds is a talented, multifaceted director. Along with DART’s gifted leaders – Lythgoe and Monica DiBiasio, Fitts Reynolds and the evolving company is reinvigorating satire. You know it when you see it.
In 1873, Alferd (traditional spelling) Packer joined a scruffy fortune-seeking expedition into Colorado Territory that ended in starvation and death winter 1874. He survived and was accused of killing his companions to survive. He escaped jail but was captured years later and endured two trials. He was convicted of murder, appealed many times, and served 18 years of a 40-year sentence. A Denver reporter, Polly Pry, wrote about his life and Army service, which spearheaded a campaign for his release. In 1901, Gov. Charles Thomas granted parole, not a pardon, and Packer lived to age 65, dying in 1907.
The title, including the author’s name, is important, because Trey Parker has become a comedic force in American culture, most notably for the television satire “South Park.” But back in the 1990s, when he was a student at the University of Colorado at Boulder, he teamed up with Matt Stone to concoct a spoof titled “Alferd (the early spelling) Packer: The Musical.” The two-buddy team billed their film as an American Western comedy starring themselves. In 1998, they revised it into a stage version and opened first in California’s Sierra College then Dad’s Garage Theater, Atlanta. Thereafter, it ran undercover in small American theaters until it opened off-Broadway in 2001, triggering a cult following.
Judith Reynolds is an arts journalist and member of the American Theatre Critics Association.
