Naked Boys Singing
Triangle Productions
Through July 21

They don't waste any time, these boys. Within the first 30 seconds of the first song of this skin-filled revue, you will get what you paid to see: birthday suits.

It's a liberating experience, to say the least. Some of the men (there are seven all together) are slightly portly, some are too hairy, and none are particularly well-endowed (compared to the average porn star, at least). And yet, they prance gaily about the stage as if their bodies are the most beautiful things in the world, which of course they are.

The point is, the simple shedding of cloth, performed by these very normal men, sent a burst of energy through me, and indeed, the entire crowd. We surged forward in our seats, laughing and cheering. My pretentious sensibilities don't usually allow me to surge, but in this awesome moment, that hardly mattered. I surged with the best of 'em.

Then the first song, "Gratuitous Nuditiy," ended, and the next one began, and it was also about getting naked. And then the next song was also about getting naked... and the next, and the next. A few of the songs took on more solemn themes. "Window to Window" is about a stalker stripping in his front window with the hopes that his stalkee will see him, and "Stripped" is a really weird number about a man who has been forced to take his clothes off in the middle of a park. But such songs feel out of place in the glut of silliness that surrounds them, and even if you do take them seriously, they're still ultimately just songs about getting naked. The whole revue seems so infatuated with this wonderful concept that it forgets to throw in things like any sort of recurring theme, or character development.

The actor/singers have a lot of fun, and for the most part have nice voices, but something about the acoustics of the space also makes their voices extremely quiet. I could hardly hear even the chorus numbers, and I wasn't even sitting in the back row. The low amplitude, combined with director Donald Horn's fairly low-brow choreography, combined with a cheap technical design--song ends, lights fade to black, lights come up, next song begins--combined with a never-ending stream of dick jokes, gives the evening a very amateurish feel. This would be okay were it not for the show's exorbitant price-tag ($20!), which shifts the evening's festivities from the realm of Misguided-But-Cute to the wasteland of the Total Rip-Off, where bad plays go to die.