If you canât lick âem, join âem. To lure audiences away from movies and TV, some theaters are taking cues from their competition. Recent successful productions riff off Showgirls, Point Break and Charlieâs Angels; now Wayne Rawleyâs popular Seattle serial, inspired by The Dukes of Hazzard and Miami Vice, debuts with its first installment, âMoney, Take Run,â in which two hot-blooded criminals, Money (Johanna Watts) and Run (Joshua Sliwa), meet-cute when holding up the same liquor store. Their romantic fireworks are outdone by the goofball supporting characters, which include Tobias Jelinek as a turtleneck-wearing manhunter, Pete Caslavkaâs drunken bum, and the grandstanding and fierce Alyssa Bostwick as Big Momma Bob, the local liquor-emporium czarina who wants to see Money strung up by her belly shirt. Rawleyâs honed his clever quips and sharp timing â even an opening-credits sequence is a hoot. Itâs live, but is it theater? As the narrator (Rawley) tells us to âstay tuned for scenes from the next episode,â and the cast races through a quick montage, the best we and this production can hope is that theaterâs fun, albeit flattened reinvention is less disposable than its origins.
Fridays, Saturdays, 10:30 p.m., 2008
