Chuck and Ginger Babcock's show at The Duplex was a preview of their Off-Off-Broadway theater piece of that name due to open the following month.  Billed as a song-and-dance team, the pair were considerably more song than dance, and the patter strongly hinted at the plot of the show-to-be.  Happily so, or the show's title would have forever remained a puzzlement.  The hook?  They were cyrogenically frozen back in 1962, and had just been “thawed for your pleasure.”  Get it?

Forgetting the plausibility of it all, they did a reasonable job of evoking the 'sixties and, much more to the point, of keeping their audience in stitches with a lunatic plot of needing a place to pad down and visiting Liza and Liz Taylor seeking an invitation to stay. Sophistication never entered the writers' minds, but with the interplay between Chuck and Ginger, his antic facial grimacing, and a few occasional bawdy lines and lyrics, who was to mind?

The Babcocks had an undeniable appeal as they made the rounds of songs, a parody or two, occasional dancing, and an “audience participation” number when they brought up a burly guy to be vamped by Ginger as she sang “Fever.”  There was so much farce on stage that it seems almost – but not totally – irrelevant to note that while the repartee was more critical to the show than the music, they have very pleasant voices and attractively presented their songs, from “Summertime” and “Beyond the Sea” to “Straighten Up and Fly Right.”

The full, Off-Off-Broadway Thawed for Your Pleasure will play Sundays, September 7^th through October 12th at the Wings Theater in Greenwich Village.

Peter Leavy
Cabaret Scenes
August 13, 2008
www.cabaretscenes.org