Beauty and the Beast Married performance artists Julie Atlas Muz and Mat Fraser, billing themselves as Oneofus, spend a none-too-subtle evening drawing parallels between the titular 18th-century fairy tale and their own romantic relationship. Muz, a burlesque performer and onetime Miss Coney Island, is the beauty, while Fraser, a self-described disability artist with thalidomide-induced phocomelia (he calls his arms “small and perfectly deformed”) is, discomfitingly, the beast. For 80 minutes they alternately enact the fairy tale, ably assisted by clever puppetry and cunning scenic design, and recount the course of their romance. Neither story digs much below the surface, and neither performer has adequate chops to command a stage as large as MCA’s. By the finale they’re nude and thrashing away in semi-simulated coitus. Bully for them. —Justin Hayford
Tonya and Nancy: The Rock Opera! The kitschy premise behind Elizabeth Searle and Michael Teoli’s new musical—relitigating Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan’s 1994 Winter Olympics figure-skating fiascovia musical theater—sounds like the inspiration for a piano-only 45-minute late-night Annoyance or Upright Citizens Brigade set. At its heart, that’s what I suspect this Underscore Theatre Company production, directed and choreographed by Jon Martinez, more closely resembles, though this ensemble has the comedic and vocal chops to more than fill an hour and half on Theater Wit’s full-size stage. Amanda Horvath and Courtney Mack radiate as the titular ice queens, and Veronica Garza steals the show a handful of times doing double duty as each’s Shakespearean mothers. It’s a fabulously weird and legitimately experimental musical presented in a time when they’re too hard to come by. —Dan Jakes
