Summer Fun with Street Theatre
Lizard Boy
With a name that’s bound to catch your eye, Lizard Boy is Street Theatre’s final show of the season. Originally performed in 2015, Justin Huertas’ show has been performed Off-Broadway in 2023 and now has its regional premier in Nashville. It has a cast of three: the protagonist Trevor, Cary the romantic interest, and Siren, the mysterious rock star.
The show is challenging for the actors, who are on stage the whole time. They act, dance, sing, and over the course of the show, play the guitar, ukulele, kazoo, piano, glockenspiel, tambourine, shakers, keytar, beatbox and possibly something else I’ve forgotten. The instrumentation of the original has been slightly adapted: Justin Huertas, the playwright and star of the original production plays the cello (part of an obviously tiny venn diagram overlap) so for Street Theatre’s production Julie Adams plays the cello on a separate part of the stage. These instruments are incorporated into the show: there are dueling guitars, the glockenspiel is used to cue instant message dings, and they’re even brought into the choreography. During “The Woah Song” Cary plays guitar while he and Trevor sing a duet. As they come together, Trevor puts one hand around him and the other on the guitar, shaping the chords while Cary strums, a well-crafted moment by Director Deonté L. Warren. It’s a lot, and the cast who took on the challenge does very well. When I attended the preview performance June 12th there were a few moments where you could feel the difficulty of the musical demands, but they were few and felt temporary. The indie-rock music is catchy, with some great melodies and harmonies. With the constant movement of the staging, harmonies, and off-stage cellist, the small black box theater surely provided challenges for sound design to balance the audio, but it is done perfectly.
Lizard Boy begins on Monsterfest, their local holiday rather like Halloween, celebrating the defeat of a dragon twenty years ago. Trevor wakes up from a dream about a dragon and a frightening woman singing to him. He decides to try to leave his apartment for once: ever since that dragon attack he’s been green and only goes outdoors when he can fit in with costumed people. He met a guy at last year’s Monsterfest but was rejected when the guy realized that he is actually green. Trevor hasn’t gotten over this spoiled romance, and hoping to meet him again he looks for him on Grindr. Instead of finding him, a man named Cary messages and invites him over. Trevor nervously arrives at his apartment, hoping to make a friend, but Cary thinks it’s a hookup. Once this comic confusion is cleared, they decide to hang out. After spotting a magazine with the woman he had dreamed about on the cover they go to the club where she is singing.
At about this point Lizard Boy cleverly splits the timeline, allowing Trevor to alternate conversations with Cary before the rock show and Siren after the show in her dressing room. At one point he sings a hopeful song he wrote and we see them listen to it in both timelines simultaneously. After the scene with Siren in her dressing chamber, we return to one timeline. This simple choice smooths the pacing and works intuitively.
The plot is deliberately tropey, but sometimes the tropes are perfunctory or don’t quite gel together. Towards the end, after a sweet song and a kiss, Trevor unexpectedly gets furious when Cary freaks out over blood from a cut, assuming that Cary is rejecting him for being green, even though they’d just gone over that. Trevor insults him harshly and leaves, allowing the plot to reach the rock bottom moment before the climax of the plot, but coming seconds after their romantic moment it undercuts the feeling.
There are other difficulties with the execution of plot: the dialogue often steals its own thunder by not giving us context, and thus scale for their conversation. We’re never given a clear understanding of the world they inhabit. At first I assumed it’s just like ours, but if so, how did Cary forget a news story from his childhood about a real dragon escaping from an erupting Mount St. Helens? I mean, I remember headlines about Britney Spears shaving her head in 2007 and wasn’t even into pop music as a kid. Was this the only dragon, or have there been many? Later characters mention a possible world-ending event, but it’s never explained how many people believe it.
The heavily emphasized message of Lizard Boy is to embrace what makes you different, because that’s what makes you special. This is good, but since this has been the message of most children’s media for decades it’s hard to make it feel profound.
Like the original production, Street Theatre doesn’t give Trevor green skin. I’m not sure why this is the standard choice: Elphaba looks amazing in Wicked. Maybe they are trying to avoid an accidental Tobias Fünke Blue Man Group look? This could also be an effort to help us see Trevor’s humanity, but that goes against the grain of the message of the show about being different. It’s also just clunkier: at the start of the show Trevor has to explain to us that he’s green when instead he could have just been green. There is a nod to the greenness with nail polish and a cool green streak in Trevor’s hair. I like the costumes: everyone is dressed well and in ways that match their character, and I wouldn’t mind some of their pieces in my own wardrobe.
Eklan Singh is Trevor and gives the character great tension. You can feel how he wants to be outside with people, but he’s so used to being alone he almost prefers it. Delaney Amatrudo is Siren, the mysterious woman from Trevor’s dreams. Her rendition of “Terrible Ride” is passionate and exciting, and she leaned into the bad girl attitude in a really fun way. Shane Kopishke is charming and funny, making Cary’s goofiness natural and likeable. His character is my favorite; the relatable “normal” person, quirky, kind, and forgiving.
I’ve focused for a bit on the faults of the plot, but it’s still a fun watch and Street Theatre does it with good energy. If you enjoyed Scott Pilgrim, this show is in that ballpark: it is silly with great jokes and good music. It moves pretty quickly and is only 80 minutes, about an hour shorter than many Marvel movies and a lot more enjoyable. There’s no intermission, preventing second act fatigue (so if you want wine or snacks, buy them before the show).
Street Theatre will be performing Lizard Boy at the Barbershop Theater through June 28th. See here for tickets and more information.
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G E Tipton was born in Nashville and raised there and in Spring Hill. She graduated from MTSU in 2017 with a degree in German and a minor in piano performance. She spent three years in Boston before returning to Nashville in 2020. She is married and has a baby boy.
