STAGE REVIEW : ‘Beauty Shop’ Dishes Dirt at Pantages

So what’s behind this show, “Beauty Shop”? It was a hit last summer (as well as earlier occasions) at the Wilshire Ebell and it blew back into town Wednesday for a two-week run before a howling crowd at the Pantages.

An enthusiastic audience is behind it, for one thing. Insults--gay, fat and ugly jokes--may be its soul food, but sex is its bread and butter.

For example, there are two strands of a plot that unfold in this hothouse. In one, a mean siren of a woman storms into the Pamper Me beauty parlor and demands to know “which one of you has been messing around with my husband?”

The incident triggers a confession from one of the customers (the hilarious Sharon McKee), a snooty middle-aged wife who falls into a paroxysm of heat in her beauty chair recounting a sexcapade with her gardener. It was hot and he wanted a glass of water. Her body writhes and finally stiffens up like a board across the arms of her chair, and the house roars.

Later, the neighborhood mailman (Lamont Bonman), who’s always being rebuffed by the women in the shop, strips down to his briefs at a birthday party for a lonely, fat beautician named Margaret. He uncorks a gyrating routine to the number “Bad,” which shames any hunk who ever danced at Chippendale’s and sends the women in the audience into gales of screams.

Bring on the lions. Well, the dancing girls anyway, and suddenly there they are, eight leggy chorines weaving down the aisles to give the male patrons something to ogle. That muscular mailman was becoming too much.

What are sequined dancing girls doing in a beauty shop? Who cares. This is Vegas, this is soap, this is listening to gals under the dryer and in curlers dishing out the dirt. Is it theater? Well, it’s not “The Piano Lesson” or even “Mama, I Want to Sing.”

Producer/director/writer Shelly Garrett has stated in print that he conceived “Beauty Shop” for black audiences, but you don’t have to be black to identify with these characters or this humor. However, there are no crossover themes. This is the five-and-dime of black literature. The women stand with their hands on their hips a lot. They’re fighters. Talk about steel magnolias. The few black men in the play are milquetoasts for the most part. Everyone mugs and plays it over the top. The body language is relentless.

The happy ending, to billows of clouds rising from the stage, is so saccharine that even its moment of carnal vulgarity draws a whoop and a cheer. Let the public eat cake, indeed.

At 6233 Hollywood Blvd., Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., Saturdays, 3 p.m., Sundays, 3 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., through Aug. 12. $19.50-$27.50. (213) 410-1062.