The Roar of the Butterfly

“The roar of the butterfly” is rarely heard in this self-billed “one-woman musical comedy.”  The one woman, Spider Saloff, succeeds as actress, singer and songwriter, but she falls short as bookwriter and, as a result, the show falls short as an effective theater piece.

 Butterfly is an androgynous, bisexual, cross-dressing Asian who has died before the play begins.  In fact, the play takes place at a wake for the dearly departed, set in a piano bar in Greenwich Village and featuring testimonials by eight people who knew him over the years, all played by Saloff.

There are: Marie, our hostess; Alice, the Scottish waitress; Muriel Winslow, an aging actress; Riffy, a male poet from Chicago; Mrs. Sordalino, a hair salon owner from South Philadelphia; Mrs. Bentley, a black woman from New York; Helga, Butterfly’s college roommate from Germany; and Sam, a Lithuanian limo driver — each one defined by a wig or piece of headgear and/or a different jacket or wrap.

Each talks about how he or she met Butterfly and — generally, but inconsistently — how he affected their lives.  Some, mostly Marie, follow the monologues with songs that reflect part of the relationship.  The vignettes are funny or dramatic or a mix of both — and Saloff acts them brilliantly — but they often lack clarity in terms of establishing just who Butterfly was and how he impacted each one’s life.

The music and lyrics for all 10 songs in the show — mostly blues, with some soft jazz and Broadway also included — are credited to Saloff, who performs them very well.  Most touching was “Deep Inside the Rain,” an affecting ballad with beautiful lyrics (“People come and go/But for me/You’ll always be there/Deep inside the rain”).  Providing effective support off stage throughout the show was pianist Jim Sellers.

However, after 90 minutes of listening to these people talking and singing about him, one still does not have a clear picture of this Butterfly character by the end of the evening.  When we first hear about him, he is the toast of the piano bar, with everyone excited by his mere entrance into the room.  However, his life as a gay man is never explored, nor his bisexual passions, nor his cross-dressing.  And when one of Saloff’s characters meets someone named “Mother” years later and is surprised to find it is actually Butterfly, so are we, the audience, since this new alter-ego is never quite explained.

Nor are all these characters really relevant to the show’s concept, delivering monologues about brief encounters with Butterfly that don’t always define any strong link with him.  The most tangential seem to be the aging actress, who’s there mainly for laughs — and to sing an amusing song (“Strangers in the Moonlight”) about a romance with someone she deems below her class — and Alice, who drops the F-word right, left and center, who seems to be included solely to show off Saloff’s ability to do a Scottish accent (and to shoehorn in “Alice’s Blues”).  Saloff has included some of these characters in her cabaret act over the years and, in short bursts, they may work better than they do as part of a whole that never quite coalesces.

Among the characters who do work — because they make clear the impact Butterfly has had on their lives — are: Mrs. Bentley, who describes how Butterfly helped her daughter put her life back together after an abusive marriage mixed with drugs (though the daughter’s specific problems are not clearly defined); Sam, who talks about how Butterfly gave him the courage to give up limo driving to pursue his true desire to become a dance instructor; and Marie, whom Butterfly advised to be herself “because that’s something no one can ever take away from you.”

Surprisingly, the least original characterization — Helga, the caricature of a self-possessed German woman (think Marlene Dietrich) — turns out to be Saloff’s most poignant vignette.  Saloff has imitated Dietrich in her cabaret shows, and some of Dietrich’s patter finds its way into Helga’s mouth.  By the end of the piece, with Helga finally allowed to visit the dying Butterfly at a hospice, the monologue was the most affecting in the show.  The character also sings an amusing song called “Falling for Everyone” — with an obvious debt to “Falling in Love Again” (Friedrich Hollaender/Sammy Lerner).

Another derivative song is “Dancing Shoes” — sung by the limo-driver-turned-dance-instructor — which is very similar to the Harry Warren/Al Dubin classic “Forty-Second Street and which provides a lively change of pace from some of the heavier numbers in the show.

Saloff acknowledged in a brief curtain speech that the show is still a work-in-progress, so maybe by the time it re-opens for an extended run in Chicago, where it originated, the work will have indeed progressed.

Until then, though, Saloff roars as a performer. She still needs to make it much clearer how loud this Butterfly roars, and why.

Elliot Zwiebach
Cabaret Scenes
August 19, 2011
www.cabaretscenes.org