The Good, The Bad & The Coyote Ugly, The Wardrobe Theatre – ‘A delightful evening of high-paced silliness’

The western is one of those movie genres that has firmly imprinted a certain (fairly toxic) image of masculinity on popular culture: from Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name to the Marlboro Man, depictions of the American West have celebrated the tough, the hard-bitten, the solitary, and the emotionally numb. Cowboys don’t cry.

If women feature at all in this world, they are always secondary characters, either saloon bar floozies or homesteader madonnas. So it feels particularly fitting to watch an all-female cast deliver a scorching feminist parody of the genre.

And because this is the festive offering from The Wardrobe Theatre – who previously offered us Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Bears, Drac & Jill and Little Women in Black – there has to be a movie mash-up involved. As the title suggests, the Wild West is superimposed on a storyline drawn pretty directly from musical comedy-drama Coyote Ugly.

Sweet country girl Mary-Sue (Sedona Rose) sits watching the tumbleweed and dreaming of heading to Dodge City to pursue her performing dreams, as her mother did before her.

When she finally leaves her father (Fowzia Madar) behind and heads for town, a series of misadventures including a nasty encounter with Sheriff Mayor Moonlight (Jenny Smith) culminate in her being dazzled by the confident Coyotes (Peta Maurice and Jenny Smith), bar workers from the Coyote Ugly Saloon.

Mary-Sue joins the Coyote team, but soon finds herself entangled in a deadly conflict with Moonlight. Fans of the movie will know, of course, that you can’t fight the Moonlight. Or can you?

Prospective audience members would be well-advised to (re)watch Coyote Ugly before attending, rather than relying on somewhat faded memories like this reviewer. But even without the knowledge to fully appreciate every movie reference in the show, The Good, the Bad and the Coyote Ugly still delivers a welcome helping of frantic entertainment in the dark days of January.

The cast work astoundingly hard, a tumble of costume changes enabling just four women to play a startling assembly of
characters.

At times, it has the shouty chaos of a show staged by nine-year-olds (which does mean that some of the gags get lost), but underneath the seemingly slapdash improvised approach there is a lot of extremely tight stagecraft and very clever thinking.

The varied approaches to depicting the extended climatic scene on a moving steam train are simply mindboggling, drawing firmly on Bristol’s rich seam of true clowning skills. And nothing induces audience laughter quite as much as a cast corpsing and handling it magnificently.

This is not a show for all the family. To illustrate, the fact that the Coyotes are called Clit and Fist prompts some extended – and extremely funny – segments which are very much not family-friendly (unless you’re very relaxed parents who are prepared to do A Lot of Explaining on the way home).

But for mature adults who have seen Coyote Ugly, it is a delightful evening of high-paced silliness to lighten the post-Christmas gloom.

Photo: The Wardrobe Theatre

The Good, The Bad and the Coyote Ugly is at The Wardrobe Theatre until January 20, at 7.45pm, and addition 2pm matinee shows on January 6, 13 and 20. Check www.tobaccofactorytheatres.com for ticket availability.

All photos: Craig Fuller

Read more: Coyote Ugly Saloon to open their first bar in Bristol

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