‘TWINS’: MAKE WAY FOR THE ODDEST COUPLE YET

“They’re identical twins in name only,” warned director Scott Hardy of “Identical Twins From Baltimore,” a new musical (with book by Marc Mantell, music and lyrics by Dan Alvy) opening Thursday at the Tiffany. The story concerns two “girls”--Jill (played by Sheryl Lee Ralph), who’s black and beautiful, and Jane (Patrick Lang), who’s a 250-pound white man.

“That’s where the insanity begins,” Hardy noted. “They come to New York, where they get this roach-infested, flea-bitten room. Jane wants to be a ballerina, Jill a Grammy winner. On her way to the top, Jill steps on everybody--while Jane cleans toilets, mops floors and is arrested as a hooker. Jill is picked up by an agent, Manny Gelt, and starts doing dubbing for almost-has-been movie star Hedy Harlow. Then Hedy ends up stripping at a club where Janie’s a janitor, and teaches her there is a way to have dignity, ‘even when you’re stripping for slobs.’

“I’m leaving out a lot of surprises,” he added. “The ending is really bizarre. But that’s what attracted me. And I’ve always loved musical theater. I’m constantly saying to people, ‘What’s new? What’s different?’ This definitely is. Mantell’s book is awfully funny stuff. And there is a moral: No matter how big you are, how bizarre you are, there’s still humanity there. In this show, everybody pays a price for success. So there is a dark through-line. But it’s also a lot of laughs.”

More humor-of-sorts: Gina Wendkos, whose “Boys and Girls/Men and Women” opens Saturday at the Odyssey, cheerfully dubs her work “a sick comedy.”

“It’s about sexuality,” she said, “all the disgusting, deceptive, manipulative methods of power between men and women, how people use sex as a weapon or a gift--and the danger of it. Often women’s plays, like ‘Uncommon Women,’ talk from the women’s viewpoint. But this is really female sexuality from a man’s point of view. And although I never mention politics in the play at all, it’s all about how power is used on people. Anyway, that’s the subtext for me.”

The story itself focuses on Vinnie, from teen-age-hood in the ‘60s to adulthood in the ‘80s--”and what he does with two women, using sex and sexual ability to get what he wants in life. In that sense, it’s not about romance at all. One does evolve, and there’s a pretty sweet ending. But it’s not a traditional romance.” Featuring a cast of 13, the first act concerns itself with loss of virginity, the second (set at a party) on contemporary “dating.”

“The mood is heightened, unnatural--yet natural,” emphasized the playwright (whose “Four Corners” and “Personality” were produced at the Odyssey in 1985). “As kids, they were trying to be adults. As adults, they’re acting like kids.”

LATE CUES: Make room for more Fringe Festival entries. On Friday, Franz Xavier Kroetz’s “Mensch Meier” (a funny/macabre story “about a working-class family in modern Germany, still suffering post-war mentality”) comes to the Odyssey. Featured are Diana Bellamy, Peter Jacobs, David J. Partington and Pia Romans; Victor Brandt directs. . .promising to “bring Jesus and St. Paul to life” is Robert Macklin’s “Bob, Paul and Jesus,” just opened at the Hope Lutheran Church. . . . Also newly opened (and winner of the longest title of the week) is Peter Weiss’ “The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade” at Friends and Artists Theatre Ensemble.