Today I turned 40, and what better way to celebrate aging than by watching Joan Collins and Linda Evans on the National Theatre's stage, starring in Legends!? (The exclamation point is part of the show's title, and the question mark just punctuates my rhetorical question.)
Back in the '80s I was a complete "Dynasty" addict, so there was no way I was going to miss this opportunity to see the two divas during the two-week run of their comedy play here in DC. I went to see it with my friend Rob, another big "Dynasty" fan who is probably the only other person I know who can reenact scenes from the campy primetime soap, especially the Moldavian wedding massacre.
It was fun to see the old gals in person, and being amongst the old ladies (not just Joan and Linda; it was a matinee, so most of the audience members were decades older than we are) certainly made me feel younger. It's like the way that I feel thinner when I sit next to someone who is a little more on the corpulent side than I am.
The play itself is pretty much a steaming pile of... well, you get the idea. Is it the shoddy writing? Certainly. Could the fault lie with the director? I'm sure he gets a large share of the blame. Might it be the fact that the show just seems too dated? Perhaps.
But despite its faults, as I said already, I wouldn't have missed this show for anything. Plus, Rob and I shared many laughs during and after the show. Unfortunately, none of the laughs have been courtesy of what were playwright James Kirkwood's intentions. We've had the most fun thinking up other pairings that producers could come up with for alternate revivals of this show: Joan van Ark and Michelle Lee, Linda Gray and Victoria Principal (who ended up being mentioned in the play's second act!), Cicely Tyson and Leslie Uggams, Maureen McCormick and Eve Plumb, and a mini-male version with Gary Coleman and Emanuel Lewis (in Li'l Legends!). Then they could do Legends Babies! which would feature child stars (Dakota Fanning and Hallie Kate Eisenberg, perhaps) as the tiny tot versions of Sylvia and Liatrice, Joan and Linda's characters, when they were competing to star in their elementary school's upcoming production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Ah, the possibilities are endless. Endlessly and totally crapulous!
