There was only one line in Posing Strap Pirates that made me laugh out loud. One of the actors, in the midst of this “madcap” farce, turned to the audience and said, “And I studied Chekhov!” If only the rest of the play had this kind of wink-at-the-audience, self-deprecatory humor, Posing Strap Pirates might have been a success. But the remainder of the play is so fraught with trying to create a “style” and so caught up in mugging for laughs, that the script gets tangled up in itself and stumbles.
Posing Strap Pirates is an effort to recreate and poke fun at two genres: the main one is the seafaring adventure, where hearty seamen (seamen…get it? That’s about the level of most of the base humor here) play out scenes which try to ape Mutiny on the Bounty, with a gay twist. The gay twist is where the second genre comes in: that of the posing strap. Back in the 1950s, in an effort to thwart censorship and possible criminal prosecution, would-be gay porn purveyors had their models wear posing straps, a tiny bit of fabric just big enough to cover a censor’s, or a lawman’s, um, biggest objection. Thus, we have several scenes here with the seamen wrestling in their posing straps, which is what the pioneer “beefcake” cinematographers would do, so they could show man-to-man contact while keeping it somehow innocent.
The idea behind Posing Strap Pirates is clever, but one that still needs a good bit of polish. Most of the humor is unsophisticated (one of the cast members says he’s a “coxswain of the highest order” while grabbing his crotch), and the execution is weak. The entire production has an almost unrehearsed quality, as if the show were hurried onto the stage with insufficient prep time. Many of the performances are amateurish, especially Christopher Zimowski, in the lead role of Toye Buck: his lithe body doesn’t fit its manly characterization and his line delivery is, at best, wooden. Angel Casey, as Miss Marzipan, displays a real knack for bad accents, with her French by way of New Orleans by way of Joliet delivery. And, as the narrator, Don Shell needs to work on his diction: it was often hard to understand him.
This is one seafaring adventure you might want to miss. Stay home and rent the excellent Beefcake instead…that film had some posing straps worth seeing.