Entertainment

Stunning Egon trip doesn’t paint full picture

Sausage, anybody? Actually, John Kelly’s “Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte” has nothing to do with meat products and everything to do with Austrian painter Egon Schiele.

A skilled chameleon, writer-director-performer Kelly is best known for his precise impersonation of Joni Mitchell.

Here, he contorts his lithe, athletic body into angular poses similar to the ones in Schiele’s self-portraits. The resemblance is uncanny, even downright spooky at times. Visitors to the Neue Galerie museum will be in familiar terrain.

But the stroll down memory lane is twofold: Set in early-20th century Vienna, the piece also transports us back to the New York experimental scene of the 1980s. Kelly first started playing Schiele in underground clubs in 1982, then presented full productions of “Blutwurst” in 1986 and 1995.

The nearly wordless 75-minute show is typical of the anything-goes mix of genres that made the East Village so creatively vibrant back then. It uses dance, mime, film, drawings and music to present both Schiele’s art and his life with muse/model Wally (Tymberly Canale) and wife Edith (MacKenzie Meehan).

Anthony Chase has added new footage to his older black-and-white projections, and it all feels of a piece. Visually, “Blutwurst” is often stunning, an Expression-istic fantasy somewhere between silent movie and hallucination.

But some of the choices feel odd, and, like some of the choreography, haven’t aged well. Kelly is often flanked by two Schiele figures (Eric Jackson Bradley and Luke Murphy), whose mere presence introduces a latent homoeroticism — Schiele was accused of many things, but not of that.

More of a problem is that there’s a certain gentleness to Kelly. Yet “gentle” is the last thing that comes to mind when you think of Schiele — he was arrested for pornography, after all, and his portraits of women could be grotesque and gynecological at the same time.

Schiele’s description of sexuality and the body could be brutally frank; Kelly’s gaze is wrapped in gauze. We’re in a dream, when we should be in a nightmare.

elisabeth.vincentelli
@nypost.com