Vaudevillian pathos

The Scrubbing Project a so-so musical satire in horror

To quote from the printed program of The Scrubbing Project, currently playing in the Factory Theatre Studio, "In many indigenous cultures, all of humanity comes from the stars. Starworld is where the ancestors come from..." Using that concept as the starting point, three very bright ladies, Jani Lauzon, Monique Mojica and Michelle St. John have created a fantasy about three entities being sent down from Starworld in order to experience life on earth as mixed-blood women. As these three ladies are in reality of mixed parentage, their creation carries with it the stamp of credibility.
These three creators also act in the play, under the watchful direction of Muriel Miguel.
The ladies, called collectively The Turtle Gals, have attacked the subject of man's inhumanity to man in a manner which can almost be described as gleeful. They have taken some of "civilized" man's most awful moments and turned them into vaudeville skits. No horrors are omitted, from the Holocaust to the decimation of the North American Indian. These stories have been told before but never through the medium of a vaudeville show, complete with the Marx Brothers and parodies of some of the standard songs from the days of burlesque. Whoever first sang "Lydia the Tattooed Lady" would never have dreamed that Lydia's strategically placed tattoos would one day list the locations - from Rwanda to Ipperwash - of some of the more shameful betrayal of human rights committed under official bureaucratic sanctions.
The plot itself is barely discernible. The three visitors to earth assume various personalities as they sing and dance their way through the various parodies. The song "High Hopes" for instance, accompanies the humiliation of a prisoner desperately pleading with her guards to let her go to the bathroom. Then there is the pathos of a youngster wondering if her brown skin can be lightened the way lint is removed from clothing by using Scotch tape or by scrubbing herself with bleach. There are preparations for a ceremonial feast, which never really happens and the problem of finding a suitable name for a child born to Jewish and Indian parents.
The second act is considerably better than the first. It opened with "The Genocide Dance" and closed with an Indian version of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" that provided the only real pathos to the evening. But it would appear that arousing pathos was not the production's intention. It was to laugh at horror in the hopes that the laughter would drown out the pain.
Of the three ladies, Michelle St. John was in better voice than her colleagues, but the difference was marginal. The trio is a threesome of actresses, not singers. I felt that there was too much mugging in the sequences which were not the vaudeville satires, which blurred the line between their vaudevillian capers and their real-life sequences.
I was also confused by the special video effects, which weren't particularly well done and which added nothing that could be immediately absorbed.
However, the play is worth seeing if only as a reminder of just how "mixed" our society is - to say nothing of how "mixed up".
The Scrubbing Project plays at Toronto's Factory Theatre Studio, 125 Bathurst Street until December 8th. Tickets can be obtained by calling 416.504.9971.

Publication Date: 2002-12-01
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=2087