STAGE REVIEW : ‘Melody’ Strips Low-Life Souls Bare

Adaptation for the stage does not mean transliteration, but a host of more subtle events: shifts in mood, texture, color, essence.

Take the adaptation of David Galloway’s novel “Melody Jones” by Dan Gerrity and Jeremy Lawrence that is currently on stage at the Cast-at-the-Circle Theatre in Hollywood. Like the 1976 novel, it is more a series of monologues than a play. It focuses on plenty of onstage striptease. It revels in a hip, muscular vocabulary of lively, upfront, strip joint and gay underworld jargon that, like the strippers’ costumes, hides very little.

Gerrity and Lawrence--he also adapted the script for “Cabaret Verboten” at the Itchey Foot--could have taken this material in any number of directions, but their method of confessional address to the audience, mixed with scant dialogue, serves this internalized novel best. We are as much inside the heads of these people as we are in the Melody Bar in Buffalo, N.Y., in the early ‘70s.

The bar’s owner, Melody Jones (vulnerable and tainted as played by Gerrity), is a gay singer who’s created his own venue. A starstruck loner with a withered hand, he is yearning for a real relationship as he voyeuristically observes the comings and goings at the bar through the one-way mirror in his upstairs apartment.

The joint’s most outre denizen is Sammy (Loren Freeman), a “screaming queen” with a passion for Judy Garland--a transposed passion that in the novel belongs to Melody. But a more deadly visitor is a young hunk of a married man named Dixon (Rob Whitson).

Dixon is in denial about his attraction to men (“Hell, what’s the harm in two straight guys gettin’ it off?”), indulging his homosexuality only when his wife’s out of the way. What better cover for this kind of guy than a gay bar doubling as a strip joint?

Not that there’s anything phony about the strippers on the Melody’s stage. Not much love may be lost between smoldering Mary Louise (Stephanie Blake) and tall, brassy Brenda (Christina Whitaker), but they’re consummate pros who love to strut their stuff and have learned to bare their fangs and coexist.

Coexisting with them on occasion is Tessie (Rhoda Gemignani), a proud, over-the-hill “twirler” who takes young Sandra Mae (Leslie Sachs), the chatty, religiously raised go-go dancer, under her grandmotherly wing.

Not much happens beyond the sinewy strips (credit the performers and choreographer Michael Higgins) and the brooding personal ruminations. The landscapes are all interior. We listen to bartender Joe (Matt McKenzie) tell us how--and how much--he loves his wife. We hear from the taciturn musician Chip (Antony Alda) about his fascination with music. And we watch the temperature rise between Dixon and Melody.

The script moves freely among the characters, borrowing from one to give to another as needed in order to balance the picture. The result is surprisingly richer than the sum of its parts. We inhale personalities, with all their secretive, undeclared quirks exposed.

Much of the show’s success is directly linked to skillful casting. Each actor blends with his character, from Blake and Whitaker’s distinctive stripping and living styles, to Freeman’s hilariously overblown Sammy, Alda’s Zen cogitations, McKenzie’s benign squareness, Sachs’ babblings and Gemignani’s tantalizing descriptions of past glories.

Kitty Murphy’s costumes flesh out the personalities (no pun intended), though Blake’s knockout outfits are reportedly her own. The stage environment at the Cast-at-the-Circle is smartly laid out by designer Andy Daley, with Ken Booth’s lighting underscoring both the cheap flamboyance of the place and its underlying sleaze.

Director Ron Link has an affinity for this kind of flashy, volatile piece, which falls somewhere between noir and picaresque and is paradoxically steeped in raunch and middle-American reality. Nothing here stands still for very long. Every confidence is a shimmering, uncontrived revelation and each gesture feeds a story.

“Melody Jones” draws to a sudden, tragic conclusion that is planted earlier in the novel but here comes almost too late to matter. Not important. The real satisfaction--one can’t quite call it fun--is in getting there.

* “Melody Jones (A Strip Tease in Two Acts),” Cast-at-the-Circle Theatre, 800 N. El Centro Ave., Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends Sept. 27. $15; (213) 462-0265. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes. Antony Alda: Chip

Stephanie Blake: Mary Louise

Loren Freeman: Sammy

Rhoda Gemignani: Tessie

Dan Gerrity: Melody Jones

Matt McKenzie: Joe

Leslie Sachs: Sandra Mae

Christina Whitaker: Brenda

Rob Whitson: Dixon

A stage adaptation of David Galloway’s novel by Dan Gerrity and Jeremy Lawrence, presented by Diana Gibson for Ted Schmitt’s Cast Theatre and by BeBe Love productions. Director Ron Link. Sets Andy Daley. Lights Ken Booth. Costumes Kitty Murphy. Sound Scott Watson. Strips Michael Higgins. Stage manager John Hagen.