Playwright: Charles Busch. At: Hell in a Handbag Productions at Ebenezer Lutheran Church, 1650 W. Foster Ave. Tickets: 800-838-3006 or HandbagProductions.org; $28-$38. Runs through: July 10
Onstage comic timing can be so mysterious and elusive. The slightest inflection can be the determining factor between minor audience titters or a collective belly laugh.
This reminder of why comedy can be so tricky is apparent throughout Hell in a Handbag Productions' Chicago premiere of Charles Busch's drag comedy The Divine Sister. It's a valiant effort with many chuckles, but not quite polished enough to be the laugh-fest The Divine Sister should be.
Back when it debuted off-Broadway in 2010, The Divine Sister was critically hailed as a return to form for Busch, who rose to fame off of drag camp classics like Vampire Lesbians of Sodom and Die, Mommie, Die! The Hollywood-loving drag actor/author was clearly at home playing a 1960s fundraising Mother Superior in his camp homage to classic and modern Catholic nun movies like The Song of Bernadette, Black Narcissus, Agnes of God, Doubt and even The Da Vinci Code.
The Hell in a Handbag ensemble gathered by director Shade Murray looks great on paper. And the fact that The Divine Sister is staged in an actual church to represent the play's rundown Pittsburgh settings should have given the production more of a naughty frisson.
But there are times when it becomes clear that the show would have benefitted from more rehearsal time. While you don't need to know all the references to Catholic films that get dropped in The Divine Sister, the cast's delivery of them could have been more knowing and apparent.
As the leading Mother Superior with a checkered past ( including time as a snappy star reporter in the vein of Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday ), David Cerda really needs to get a better handle on memorizing and finessing his lines.
Audibility and enunciation issues plagued Maria Stephens, as the German Sister Walburga. Stephens is great with an Irish accent as the revelation-sharing cleaner Mrs. MacDuffie, but her German dialect was more incomprehensively angry-sounding than mysteriously sinister.
The shining example for the right tone and delivery in The Divine Sister is the singularly billed Chad, who marvelously embodied the dual roles of high-fashion atheist philanthropist Mrs. Levinson and the effeminate schoolboy Timmy.
Ed Jones, typically the supporting standout in most Handbag shows, does respectable if not sterling work as the butch Sister Acacius. Also offering more than capable support to the cast was the perky Charlotte Mae Ellison as the phony miracle-prone Agnes and the dapper Levi Holloway in the dual roles of the handsome Hollywood scout Jeremy and the albino Brother Venerius.
Hell in a Handbag's take on The Divine Sister should have coalesced into better comic shape by opening night. Hopefully, things will get better as the comedy continues its run.