La Putain Avec Les Fleurs

La Putain Avec Les Fleurs

The Hideout, through Aug. 20

There's nothing sadder than a sad clown. Make-up not masking his frown, he feels out of place amongst the comedians of a jovial circus. He cries from the laughter, unsure if his audience gets him. It's a comforting paradox. No one can be that happy all the time.

But it's not just clown tragedy that reels us into the Hideout Theatre to see RoHo Productions' La Putain Avec Les Fleurs, which won the 2002 Orlando International Fringe Festival. The promise of a campy revue of Parisian exoticism circa the 1920s with a French fourpiece band, French clowns, and a big French bear, is what has you buying the ticket.

You're not walking into an ostentatious big top for a circus when going into the stage. You won't see bearded ladies, strongmen, or tightrope walkers. The moment the show starts, the actors pop out at you like a jack-in-the-box, singing and dancing. In this small tunnel, you feel as though you're looking through a fish-eye lens, each clown (at farthest 20 feet away) bobbing toward you larger than life, relying little on the colors splashed on their faces to shape their jovial expressions. The clowns are sweating in full vibrancy. It's almost grotesque. Almost.

What you don't expect is the existential journey of a triste white-face harlequin. The accordion player Tabarin, the Clark Gable look-alike Rob Houle, lifts his bowler hat charmingly when leading us through the show. You're immediately swept in, singing along to "There Are No Flowers for You" from the back of your program.

Keep reading and you'll see that RoHo not only urges you to watch the seminal Fellini films but to read Herman Hesse's Siddhartha. Before you can say "OK" at the randomness of it, you're introduced to Baptiste (Damien Moreau), the suffering clown.

Tired of his own celebrity and clunked on the head too many times as the brunt of jokes, Baptiste drops his bell-sleeved white costume and leaves the circus in search of self. "To be yourself, just yourself, is a great thing," he says. After a stint in the military, he marries a prostitute with the same desires for normalcy, leaves her, and joins a monastery. Leaving his unenlightened followers, he returns to the circus where his friend, the newly appointed resident clown, has turned ill.

Despite the fact that the accented lines are simple ("I am unhappy"), the multifaceted ensemble's Commedia dell'Arte touches add to the joie de vivre of the show, jumping from character to character like acrobats. Carly Walker exuberantly plays the innocent circus girl in love with Baptiste, the whore he marries, and Isabella Bell, the cabaret singer with moves like Madonna. Leonel Garza and Martin Lueke complete the ensemble of comedians, deserving spotlights of their own as they contort into different characters rolling over each other as clowns tend to do, tickling us for laughs.

Outside of the theatre reads a sign: "Art has meaning, reality has none," and who better than a crestfallen clown to lead us out of that reality and onto a stage.