‘Beasts of Luxury’: Low Camp, High Theatricality

If, like poet laureate, there were an honorary position for enfant terrible, John Yankee would be a hot contender for the title. Yankee’s “The Beasts of Luxury,” subtitled “A Tragic History of Beauty and Bloodshed” at LACE, combines elements of brilliant theatricality, low camp and untrammeled excess, all in one sometimes dazzling, frequently unsavory, package.

Set in 1699, the action revolves around a troupe of traveling players who are performing a play based on the lives of two of history’s most notorious mass murderers. Combining secular medieval music with jazzy contemporary tunes, this “musical” contains production numbers that stand in surrealistic counterpoint to the period, the danse macabre as mounted by a Vegas choreographer.

A French nobleman who fought alongside Jeanne d’Arc, Gilles de Rais (Yankee) was an infamous child killer of the 15th century, upon whose grisly exploits the legend of Bluebeard is based. Erzsebet Bathory (Tracy Hardwick), a Hungarian countess who believed that bathing in blood would preserve her beauty, butchered hundreds of virgins in her insane quest for eternal youth.

Although separated by continents and centuries, the De Rais and Bathory of Yankee’s Brueghelian vision are spiritual soulmates, power-mad autocrats who view their underlings as only vestigially human. Yankee makes some provocative points about the corrupting influences of absolute power, and his bloody, darkly voluptuous staging is occasionally virtuosic.

Despite this, and a radiant performance by Hardwick, the play lacks heart, heat or a moral core. Not that a work of art must be didactic. But decadent art should at the same time be morally purposeful, otherwise the enterprise exists solely as an apotheosis of vileness that sullies rather than exalts.

* “The Beasts of Luxury,” LACE, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. Today-Sunday, 8 p.m. $10. (213) 660-8587. Running time: 2 hours.