If there was ever a performer to whom the phrase “I would pay to hear her read the phone book” applies, it’s Julie Halston. Leave it to the delectable co-star of many a Charles Busch play (“Vampire Lesbians of Sodom,” “The Divine Sister”) to recite excerpts from a Times wedding announcement, a letter to Ann Landers and Nancy Reagan’s autobiography — and make each one howl-inducing funny.
“It starts with a grievance,” she says in “Classical Julie,” about not being cast in the great female roles. “If the classics don’t go to me, I will go to the classics.”
So here we get her take on Medea (“I don’t know what it’s like to have my own children, but I know what it’s like to want to kill them”); Blanche DuBois, in the “Commackian way” — a bow to the Long Island town where she grew up — and Nora from “A Doll’s House,” as interpreted by Carmela Soprano.
There’s also stand-up of the more conventional variety, in the form of bits about her own recent face-lift. When her surgeon assures her he’d be the soul of discretion, she replies, “Discretion? I tweeted it!”
But it’s her dramatic readings that take her show to dizzyingly hilarious heights. The Times wedding announcement, surely a classic of its kind, profiles a couple who share a love of “swimming in very cold water,” among other peculiar quirks. The Ann Landers letter comes from a young woman who warns of “the hazards of combining drugs and tanning salons.” And then there’s Nancy Reagan’s book, in which she writes of her daughter Patti: “As a baby, she demanded constant attention!”
The uptown cabaret act “Celebrity Autobiography” celebrates cheesy memoirs, as recited by a rotating cast of notables. No need: Just have Halston read every one.