E-Mail This Article to a Friend Shrew West Girls get the guns in Johnny Guitar BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Johnny Guitar: The Musical Book by Nicholas van Hoogstraten. Music by Martin Silvestri and Joel Higgins. Lyrics by Higgins. Directed by Paul Daigneault. Music direction by José Delgado. Choreography by David Connolly. Set by Caleb Wertenbaker. Lighting by James Milkey. Costumes by Gail Astrid Buckley. With Kathy St. George, Christopher Chew, Margaret Ann Brady, Timothy J. Smith, Christopher Cook, Luke Hawkins, Drew Poling, John Porcaro, and J.T. Turner. Presented by SpeakEasy Stage Company at the Roberts Studio Theatre in the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts through December 18.

You would think it hard to get much more camp that Johnny Guitar, the 1954 movie Western in which Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge go at it like some Ma and Ma Kettle version of Linda Evans and Joan Collins on Dynasty and Sterling Hayden hustles up eggs while Crawford cleans the phallic firearms. But you would be wrong. Just add a het-up if twangy collection of tunes and a beefed-up lesbian subtext to a close-to-verbatim rendering of the overcharged screenplay and you’ve got Johnny Guitar: The Musical, which won the 2004 Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off Broadway Musical and is now twirling its guns in the Roberts Studio Theatre courtesy of SpeakEasy Stage Company. Then, to make things a bit more ridiculous, throw in diminutive Kathy St. George as a sort of pre-sanforized Crawford, right down to the tightly curled coif, shoulders-back-and-breasts-out stance, and nostril-flaring, slightly maniacal stone-Joan countenance.

When the celluloid incarnation of Johnny Guitar (directed by Nicholas Ray) came out, critics trounced it and Crawford announced she must have been mental to make it. But the heavy-breathing Freudian melodrama went on to achieve cult status, with analysts reading into it everything from an allegory for the McCarthy witch hunts to a Baroque opera minus the score. French cinéastes including Truffaut and Godard revered it as if it were Jerry Lewis with spurs. All I know is that, in Paul Daigneault’s wry staging, which is backed by crimson skies and surrounded by deliberately flat-looking Western scenery, the cowgirl catfight escalating to an inner-stage shoot-out, it’s a hoot. Since it’s a spoof, it does more winking at the film’s Freudian feminism and purple prose than echoing of its Crucible-on-horseback politics, with Margaret Ann Brady’s fuming Emma Small less McCarthy-esque capitalist than sexually repressed Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz.

St. George is the tough but sexy Vienna, pants-wearing proprietress of a saloon on the outskirts of a New Mexico town in the late 19th century, just waiting for the encroaching railroad to make her place a frontier Foxwoods. She has been the lover of borderline outlaw the Dancin’ Kid (Timothy J. Smith) but has recently sent for a former squeeze, gunfighter Johnny Logan (Christopher Chew), who arrives brandishing a guitar and a new surname but minus his firearms. When a stagecoach is robbed, rich-bitch Emma and her lot try to frame the Dancin’ Kid and run Vienna out of business. All hell breaks loose when the Kid and his cronies rob a bank in retaliation, with Emma fronting a lynch mob and taking potshots at a chandelier. But who cares about that when you can listen to such floridly wooden utterances as "That’s a lot of man you’re carrying in those boots, stranger" or watch a giant tumbleweed slowly traverse the stage?

Nicholas van Hoogstraten is credited with the book, though it’s mostly culled from the film. Martin Silvestri and Joel Higgins wrote the music, which draws on singing cowboys like Roy Rogers and his Sons of the Pioneers (think "Streets of Laredo"), roots- or doo-wop-tinged ’50s rock, and lounge torching as in the title tune (which is sung by a red-headed ’50s diva who, when the saloon doors swing into place, returns in tight jeans as Vienna). Accompaniment as well as musical punctuation (every time the title character’s name is uttered, an overhead guitar lights up to a mysterious strum) is provided by an unseen four-person combo conducted by José Delgado, complete with the occasional castanets or maracas.

Some of the convoluted lyrics are hard to sing without pinching, and St. George doesn’t always sound as good as she can, though she delivers the tender ballad "Welcome Home" (while clad in Crawford’s virginal white with black string tie and pretending to play the piano) in sweet voice. And she blasts out the bad-girl anthem "Branded a Tramp" with bravado. Brady’s numbers are more shout-sung affairs.

Ace vocalist Christopher Chew is the initially laconic Johnny Guitar, who proceeds to dig into "Tell Me a Lie" with hip-churning Elvis-like vigor, the mock-sexy performance culminating in the ripping open of his cowboy shirt. And Timothy J. Smith, as a handsome but insecure Dancin’ Kid, brings a masculine bleat to his songs. Christopher Cook, Luke Hawkins, Drew Poling, and John Porcaro are a happy-trails cowboy quartet in red kerchiefs and glittering hatbands; one of them is accidentally shot in the opening number, so that in subsequent appearances they’re reduced to a trio. But don’t worry: it’s just a warbler that gets cut down, not the fun.