Dolls, ART make beautiful mess in 'Cellar'

December 15, 2006|Stage Review, Louise Kennedy, Globe Staff

CAMBRIDGE -- Somewhere in "The Onion Cellar," with its crashingly gorgeous music, its poetic images of bottled tears and scrawled sorrows, and its sleekly decadent Weimar/Vegas milieu, there's a fascinating play trying to get out. If this collaboration between the American Repertory Theatre and the Dresden Dolls provides only glimpses of that potential work, it's enough to make us long to see it in a more coherent form.

As it is, it's a beautiful mess. In the Zero Arrow black box theater, wonderfully transformed into a nightclub setting complete with tables and a cash bar, the Dresden Dolls -- Amanda Palmer and Brian Viglione -- unleash a storm of clotted chords and pounding rhythms in an irresistible display of the physical energy and emotional intensity that have made them one of Boston's fastest-rising bands. Palmer's sinuous voice weaves hypnotically through her viscerally satisfying melodies, anchored and launched by her fierce work at the keyboard and Viglione's hyperkinetic drumming.

But we aren't really in a nightclub, and this isn't a rock show. It's some hybrid of rock and theater, and it's in the attempt to fuse the two worlds that "The Onion Cellar" too often stumbles around in the dark. Various characters appear, during and between songs; many of them seem to be grieving a wounded relationship between parent and child. It is really hard to say, though, whether these story lines connect to one another -- or even whether they're supposed to.

Take the remote, Jameson-sipping father played by Jeremy Geidt. Advance word tells us that he's the owner of the Onion Cellar, a cabaret based on a chapter of Gunter Grass's "The Tin Drum." You wouldn't know this from anything that occurs onstage, but you would probably glean that he is the father of the young woman in the blue dress and the ex-husband of the angry woman packing up her daughter's things.

But how do they connect to the woman in a bear suit? Or the knit-capped geek named Onion Boy? Or the broadly caricatured Wisconsin tourists with a secret grief? Once or twice it seemed as if all of this was happening inside someone's head, but whose? And, if so, what would that mean?

At times the parade of deliberately odd characters can make it feel as if you've wandered into a mediocre music video, circa 1985: It's as if they're adorning the music, rather than connecting with it or through it, and so even their periodic outbursts into cathartic monologue feel grafted on. In particular, the long reminiscences by a red-suited MC (ART regular Remo Airaldi) of being punished by his father for crying and singing seem weirdly displaced. Another context might give them emotional punch. Here it's as if he's doing stand-up tragedy.