STAGE REVIEWS : ‘AIDS!’ Musical Boldly Breaks Rules but Needs Refinement

First note about “AIDS! The Musical!”: It already has won the Bad Taste Title of 1991.

It’s also a title that can be taken the wrong way. Nobody in Alan Pulner’s production at Highways is having fun at the expense of millions of dying and dead.

On the other hand, the bad taste emblem is not only deliberate, it’s a provocation, a conscious exclamation point to Highways’ second annual Ecce Lesbo/Ecce Homo Festival.

It’s as if book authors-lyricists Wendell Jones and David Stanley and composer Robert Berg are having the last laugh on those who thought that AIDS would be God’s Final Solution to social deviance. Their show wouldn’t have been possible without the two waves of AIDS-era gay social protest: first, ACT-UP’s direct action against the medical Establishment, and second, Queer Nation’s more recent, broad-themed attack on heterosexuals and less radical gays everywhere.

But for anyone with the disease, or anyone who knows anyone with the disease, “AIDS!” has to be terrific therapy (you could feel the surge of support in Saturday night’s crowd, as if a Rubicon were being crossed). Of course, that doesn’t make it a terrific show.

It’s a work-in-progress, and then some. Jones, Stanley and Berg are tossing around lots of ingredients right now, but haven’t decided what it is they’re actually cooking.

Their tale of Thomas (John Ellis), a political innocent who travels through the length and breadth of gay society once he learns that he is HIV-positive after losing his lover to AIDS, is picaresque one minute and agitprop infotainment the next.

And though you can feel the makers reaching for the giddy high jinks and rowdy street politics tradition of a San Francisco Mime Troupe, they capture some of that tradition’s heat but only a glimmer of the light.

While the game plan is to attack the disease, public apathy and the political enemies of gays and lesbians with wit and song, it’s undercut by truly peculiar casting: The good voices are demoted to small, supporting roles, and the weak, often inaudible (due to the over-cranked volume of the taped score), sometimes tone-deaf voices are awarded with the leads.

We want to hear much, much more from Theresa Michel’s transsexual, New Age, country-Western mother figure (no kidding) or Ron Mesa’s leather-bar-hopping spiritualist (no kidding, again), and far, far less from Jones as an obsessed care-giver or Ellis, who looks very uncomfortable trying to carry the show’s book on his shoulders.

The sheer, admirable nerve of squeezing into one show nearly every strata of gay life--the variety of gay spiritual expressions, alone, should impress non-gay viewers--lends “AIDS! The Musical!” an anthropological value. It’s this scope that allows Berg’s uneven score to roam the map from silly stuff like “In Your Body” to the acerbic “Momma, I Need a Gun.”

You also have to chuckle over an evening that exudes the spirit of a Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland musical where the rallying cry is, “Hey kids! Let’s put on a show!” But now that Jones, Stanley and Berg have pushed down the barrier that says that you can’t treat AIDS comically, they have to get down to the hard business of crafting a real musical.

* “AIDS! The Musical!,” Highways, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica, Thursday-Sunday, 8:30 p.m. Ends Sunday. $10; (213) 453-1755. Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes.