Rocknrollas fall to pieces in Dad’s Garage’s Mojo
Wednesday, February 11th, 2009
SUIT CASE: 'Mojo's' Skinny (Ed Morgan, left), Silver Johnny (Clint Sowell), Mickey (Doyle Reynolds), Sweets (Matthew Myers), Potts (Scott Warren) and Baby (Brent Rose)
Dad’s Garage Theatre’s darkly comic play Mojo suggests that pub-crawlers and bobby-soxers should steer clear of Ezra’s Atlantic, a London nightclub in the midst of 1958’s rising rock scene. After a potentially big deal goes horribly wrong, Ezra’s employees and spongers hole up in the club to sort out their predicament and figure out who’s on whose side. One cockney hustler declares, “One of us just got sawed in two, so I don’t want to be on our side.”
Mojo’s blend of seedy underworld characters and Jacobean rivalries, not to mention the play’s wicked use of violence, rock music and hyper-verbal comedy, put it clearly in the company of 1990s bloody hipster films. Playwright Jez Butterworth wrote Mojo in the mid ’90s, roughly between the release of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The chain of influence is hard to miss. (Dad’s online trailer emphasizes the connection.) Given the 50-year-old slang and thick (if not always convincing) accents, audiences might want to rent Julien Temple’s brassy musical Absolute Beginners for a refresher course on swinging London of the late 1950s.
At Dad’s Garage Theatre’s Top Shelf, the playhouse’s ensemble feasts on the florid dialogue and high-tension confrontations. It makes for an entertaining production that still feels like a half-success — like a cover version of a song that never escapes the shadow of the original.
