The catty group of gals in the Louisiana beauty shop of Steel Magnolias is at it, full throttle, at Cape May Stage. Robert Harling's play came to Broadway in 1987 - two years before the wildly successful movie with a bang-up cast that included Dolly Parton, Sally Field, and Shirley MacLaine.
And a few streets from Cape May Stage's intimate theater built neatly into a former church, another professional stage company produces inside a working church: East Lynne Theater Company, where the late wit and Algonquin Roundtable queen Dorothy Parker currently takes over in a world-premiere, four-member production that highlights her poetry and fiction - much of it about women's reactions of the last early-middle American century.
Gals, you have taken over.
JoAnne Worley, who became a star on TV's Laugh-In, and Cindy Williams, from Laverne & Shirley, head up the skilled cast of Surflight's The Odd Couple. In the traditional male version, a man's marriage has broken up, and he moves into the apartment of one of his best friends. The men tend to settle differences with a salty aggression. In the female version, in which a woman breaks up and moves in with a friend, things seem much more cartoonish, at least under the direction of Billy Van Zandt.
I like the cartoon quality of the characters, though, and the women, gathering to play Trivial Pursuit or dish (or both), are a hoot - so much so, the female version has a giddy lightness that makes the play more fun than the original. As in the male version, the six pals are all neatly drawn and quite different from one another, and the folks upstairs - two guys in this instance - drive the plot to a new level.
