Lord Oxford Brings You the Second American Revolution, Live!

There’s a crumb of food for thought buried under the strenuously irritating tomfoolery of Lord Oxford Brings You the Second American Revolution, Live! To wit: If the Battle of Brooklyn had gone a different way, and the American Revolution had been suppressed, where would we all be now? Would African slaves and Native American tribes have fared better, at the expense of white Europeans? Would the men we revere as founding fathers, such as Washington and Jefferson, have died in ignominy and defeat?

If that kind of alternative-historical speculation tickles you, you’d still best steer clear of this leaden fruitcake of a show, which—in place of entertainment or insight—offers us a promenade of vamping, screeching, and audience-accosting metatheatrics. Writer-composer Robert Honeywell plays powder-faced, bespectacled Lord Oxford, a functionary of England’s Royal Eastern American colonies, who leads a dispiriting variety show with a hideous, bloodied cartoon orphan (a game Audrey Crabtree) as his sidekick. Dreary songs by chorus girls from Germany, Russia and Spain, as well as a serious young thespian from Delaware (Lynn Berg), ensue. The climax involves an abrupt interruption at gunpoint—a fair enough way to embody the audience’s feelings, since by then the only history we’d like to revise is the hour we’ve just wasted.