Jeffrey Neuman’s canny drama, “The Headliners,” wows at Pluss Theatre

In the Mizel Arts and Culture Center’s Pluss Theatre, something special is taking place: A new play is coming into its own. Having donned the stuff that full productions are made of — attuned scenic, lighting, sound and costume design (always costume design) — “The Headliners” is getting its world premiere.

And the Cherry Creek Theatre’s staging of Jeffrey Neuman’s wise play — which runs through May 21 — quietly wows.

Neuman sets his engaging drama — with music and a little bit of sashaying — in 1908, the year New York City’s vaudeville quasars Eva Tanguay and Julian Eltinge decided to flip the script on the institution of marriage (or perhaps punk their audiences) with a public engagement to take place on stage. She’d wear the tux. He, a masterful female impersonator, would be the bride.

With some psychological accessorizing and a deep dive into the historical record by the playwright, “The Headliners” pulls the curtain on the pair as they head into their really big show. In doing so, the fluidly wise play stirs thoughts about identity and performance (and where the twain meet) that will resonate with our LGBTQ+ (always plus) moment but also dives into their seemingly fraught friendship.

Inhabited beautifully by Norrell Moore and Jeremy Rill, Eva and Julian (or Julie, as she teases him) often seem like professional frenemies at best. She’s no-holds barred. He’s pent up in ways that make it easy for Eva to tease him, to infer things about his sexuality based on his love of his craft. That each has an interpretation of the Salome and Dance of the Seven Veils act becomes a telling entry into the ways they see themselves as artists and, perhaps, as people.

The show comes by its deft handling of the pair’s song and dance — their emotional minuet as well as their actual onstage performances — honestly. Director Nick Sugar knows how to put on a show. (It was in the Sugar-directed Town Hall Art Center productions of “Hair” and then “Anything Goes” a few years back that Moore made a cumulative and lasting impression.)

And anything goes for Eva. Heralded by show cards announcing her act brought onstage by the stage manager (Paul Jaquith playing that role for both stars), she vamps in a cocktail dress made of dollar bills. “Let me slip into something more frugal,” she says to the audience.

Her curls cascade. Her smile is expansive. Moore’s voice is more polished than Eva’s was (if scratchy recordings are any indication), but she gets into the coy spirit of Eva’s songs just the same.  “My voice may sound funny, but it’s getting me some money,” she sings in the classic “I Don’t Care,” a song that suggests the opposite of what it insists. (As if you need further proof of a forced indifference, Judy Garland sings the song in “In the Good Old Summertime.”)

Eva’s an audience wooer, a flirt, a winker-nudger. She’s unafraid to mix it up with a heckler and she’s got a knack for self-promotion. At the play opens, she has recently placed an ad announcing their engagement to take place at Harlem’s Alhambra. Julian is not comfortable with her marketing strategy.

“Think about it: Two of the biggest names in entertainment tying the knot!” she says with what turns out to be congenital verve. “People will eat it up! I mean, we’re a match made in headlines: ‘Eva and Julian: Who Will Wear the Pants at the Altar?’ Or, ‘The Queen of Vaudeville to Wed The Prettiest Girl on The Stage.’”

When we first meet Eltinge, he’s stretched on a chaise lounge in Eva’s dressing room wearing a bespoke suit, fedora and wingtips. When Eva removes his hat, we see he’s got on lipstick and eyeliner. (The effect recalls Boy George circa “Karma Chameleon.”)  Julian’s first song in costume contains the chorus: “But the maiden prepossessing, who can always keep you guessing, is the one girl for you.”

He pauses, rips off his wig and says in a voice decidedly binary, “So long, fellas!” (Ah, to cast a spell and then break it like a knowing steer in the china shop of illusion.)

Over the course of the one-act play, Eva and Julian will trade quips, they’ll infuriate and hurt each other, they’ll tell each other the stories of their origins  and then revise them with more vulnerability. And they’ll show why they each were stars, even as they feared the fickleness of fame.

Learning that director Sugar and Moore were reuniting for this play would have been gold seal enough. Add musical director David Nehls — who on piano leads a small trio jimmied somewhere backstage — and the production’s who’s who gives a strong sense of what’s what.

Still, it’s Rill who is the revelation here, especially when Julian transforms himself into one of the onstage female characters that made him for a good spell, one of Broadway’s highest-paid performers. He was a pioneer of the art of drag, one bent on creating an illusion of a “real” woman rather than offering up a caricature.

Denver-based playwright Neuman has done something special with “The Headliners,” which was a finalist at the Eugene O’Neill National Playwriting Conference and for the Newman/Woodward Award.  For all its well-earned aches, “The Headliners” is rife with the well-turned phrase followed by an unexpected insight:

Julian: “Every time I take a breath, I get Julius Caeser-ed by whalebone,” he says of his French corset.

Eva: God, I hate those things. Torture chambers. Practically medieval.

Julian: I find them sort of … comforting. In a very uncomfortable sort of way, that is, being so — squeezed in. Held together.

Will the pair actually go through with what the marriage stunt promises, let alone the onstage engagement? This “will they or won’t they” provides the play its narrative tension, but their sparring over who they are and who they aren’t gives Neuman’s play its always resonant depth.

IF YOU GO

“The Headliners”: Written by Jeffrey Neuman. Directed by Nick Sugar. Musical direction David Nehls. Featuring Norrell Moore, Jeremy Rill and Paul Jaquith.  At Cherry Creek Theatre at the JCC Mizel Arts and Culture Center, 350 S. Dahlia. Through May 21. For tickets and info, cherrycreektheatre.org

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