Pop Music Reviews : It’s Rock vs. Reality at ‘Wedding’ Band’s Show

It was just another Monday night at the Coconut Teaszer, except that the big-haired band on stage wasn’t real, most of the Gypsies, tramps and shady businessmen in the colorful crowd weren’t real, the record-company president and his lovely assistant unctuously greeting the reviewer weren’t real, and after a while even said reviewer began to feel not long for this sphere of reality.

What this was was the local club debut of Donny Dulce & Fusion, better known as the “Tony N’ Tina’s Wedding” band, as seen in the brilliantly funny interactive theater production currently packing ‘em in at the Park Plaza Hotel. The rockin’ quartet used its night off from Madonna medleys to try out a batch of original material from a supposedly imminent album debut, with the entire wedding party on hand and in character.

Spinal Tap’s show at the Music Machine back in ’84 is the closest thing in memory to the sense of disorientation offered here. If anything, cheerful popsters Dulce & Fusion have a much harder job than those dinosaur-rock imposters, in that they’re reasonably proficient, spookily commercial and entirely believable in their unerring sense for the contemporary cliche--all the way down to the requisite cautionary tale about “life on the edge” and a romantic power ballad amid their party anthems.

Nothing is too obvious about any of this on-target musical fiction. So you had to wonder what any oblivious Teaszer patrons thought when the second set finally descended into pandemonium, like the wedding itself. It seems that about the time bridesmaid Donna stripped down to her lingerie to warble “Wind Beneath My Wings” with the band, her boyfriend Dominick realized that she had indeed been carrying on with singer Donny. Much brawling, pipe-wielding and Italian profanity ensued, on stage and in the courtyard.

Most of the disgruntled male wedding-party members, still in character, headed down the street to the Body Shop, while the ersatz record-company head drunkenly crawled around the corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights with his pants around his ankles. It wasn’t any more inconceivable than a night out with Thelonious Monster, and at half the actual danger to one’s person.