As with the novels and the three TV mini-series that precede it, Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, the new musical now playing at A.C.T., is shambling and amiable. The story is set into motion when Mary Ann Singleton (beautifully embodied by Betsy Wolfe) phones home to inform her mother that she won’t be returning to Cleveland. She has decided to make a new life for herself in wicked San Francisco, the Sodom of the 1970s.
The play is full of inside jokes not only about the city, but also about the time period. It is fun to be reminded how many revolutions (sexual and otherwise) were going on in the San Francisco of the seventies — crowds in outrageous get-ups inhabit the backgrounds of most scenes and periodically take over the stage to orgy or protest or sometimes a little of both. What was once shocking — gay bathhouses, transsexuals, hookers, free love, inter-racial relationships, casual drug use and various other accoutrements of a post-hippie, disco-decadent, pre-AIDS San Francisco — now seems almost as innocent as Mary Ann when she first takes the stage.
Being a musical adaptation of Armistead Maupin’s valentine to the city, Tales is twice as sweet as normal musicals, which are often quite sticky. But how can you find fault with that? From the moment the first beat drops, a disco ball begins to spin and the stage fills up with all the noise and glitter representing ’70s San Francisco, Tales of the City is massively entertaining.
Wesley Taylor and Betsy Wolfe. Photo by Kevin Berne.
The cast is perfect. You can almost see Wolfe’s Mary Ann blush as revelations about her fellow inhabitants at 28 Barbary Lane drop throughout the play. From the time Wesley Taylor first hits the stage, you know he is Mouse, cute, cuddly and oh so romantic and open-hearted. Judy Kaye is appropriately Mother Earthy as Anna Madrigal. Mary Birdsong’s Mona is tough, sharp and vulnerable. Kathleen Elizabeth Monteleone’s DeDe Halcyon-Day is frustrated, entitled and a little naughty — for my money, she steals the show TWICE with the musical numbers “Stay for Awhile,” wherein she seduces a Chinese delivery man and “Plus One,” when she announces the results of said seduction.