Haywire!

Among Chicago theater enterprises, Hell in a Handbag—which specializes in affectionate parodies of old Hollywood trash—is probably the best of the intentionally bad. Pitch-perfect and gloriously tacky, the group frequently manages not only to skewer the high camp of, say, late-career Joan Crawford and other studio-era monster-divas, but to imbue them with a kind of demented dignity as well. It’s a shame, then, that in its latest production the company replaces its customary flair with phoned-in shtick.

Two especially execrable Crawford vehicles from the 1960s, Strait-Jacket (1964) and Berserk! (1967), serve as source material for Wilkins and Remington’s comedy, first produced in Los Angeles in 2005. The plot involves a former circus-ring mistress (the Crawford role) who returns to her old troupe after spending 15 years in an insane asylum for murdering her husband and his girlfriend. Mayhem and musical numbers ensue.

Hell in a Handbag can do this kind of material in its sleep, which might account for the production’s somnambulant nature. Faced with a poorly paced, overlong script that fails to sustain its occasional bursts of bitchery, the cast members mechanically pull from their trusty handbag of tricks (Cerda’s drag impression of Crawford, Jones’s drag impression of a frenzied prude, lots of metatheatrical winking at the audience), but it’s a shallow and perfunctory enterprise, only fitfully enlivened by the occasional dick or dyke joke.