Theater Online - New York Theater Reviews

The Devil walked into Linebaugh's on a rainy Nashville night

While the lost souls sat and sipped their soup in the sickly yellow neon light.

So begins the wickedly delightful and scurrilously charming performance piece "The Devil and Billy Markham," being temptingly offered in the subterranean Huron Club at the Soho Playhouse. The extended narrative poem, consisting of rhymed couplets, by the multi-talented Shel Silverstein (writer of both children's and adult literature, poet, cartoonist, screenwriter, composer and lyricist) evidences the author's vast creative resources on stage, as it did when first published in the January 1979 issue of Playboy Magazine and presented as a one-act play at the Lincoln Center Theater in 1989. But be prepared. This is not your typical poetry reading. And the bar is open a half hour before the show in this cozy cabaret space.

And the Devil, he looked around the room, then got down on his knees.

He says, "Is there one among you scum who'll roll the dice with me."“

When the lights come up, Brit Herring-looking every bit a blues man-takes the stage between The Broken Pockets Band (Trey Albright on percussion and Sean Singer on guitar) and they commence transporting the audience on an hour long imaginative and toe-tapping journey from "Music Row" to Hell and back again, with a few additional stopovers on Earth and even a visit to Heaven.

And there stood Billy Markham, he'd been on the scene for years,

Singin' all them raunchy songs that the town didn't want to hear.

Mr. Herring accepts the challenge of the written word and creates his own tour de force as Narrator, Billy Markham, the Devil, the world's greatest hustler's agent Scuzzy Sleezo and God himself. Misters Albright and Singer contribute not only musically by tunefully crossing t's dotting i's but also dramatically by punctuating the plot with their subtle gestures and evocative glances. Under the "don't-miss-a-beat" direction of Thomas Coté, Billy Markham's (and the audience's) odyssey is full of delightful surprises, often enhanced with the almost understated but poignant lighting design by Evan Purcell.

And now he wears his crimson robes and his horns are buttered bright,

And blood oozes through his white-linen gloves and his skin glows red the night.

Brilliance of performance and verse abound with the steady pace of Billy's fall and rise and fall, but there are episodes of pure esoteric delight (Billy's "Miltonian" descent from Heaven to Hell for the Devil's wedding and a description of who is at the fiendish gathering doing what as "the walls that separate Heaven and Hell crack and crumble away") can easily be burned in one's memory.

Along with all of the diabolically enjoyable machinations, Shel Silverstein has cleverly infused "The Devil and Billy Markham" with some verbal and metaphysical spicings. The latter, relating to the nature of good and evil as well as the devil and God, may be considered heretical by some; to others they might be philosophically thought-provoking and down right fun.