True Confessions of a Go-Go Girl, Jill Morley’s solo show about her years dancing in New Jersey go-go bars, is back. The revival opens at the Triad Theater on the Upper West Side on Thursday, October 29, at 7pm, and has two performances a week through December 11.
Performances began on October 24. The run is short: 14 performances in all, in a cabaret room at 158 West 72nd Street.
Jacqueline Frances plays the role Morley wrote for herself. The piece is built from monologues, characters, music and dance, and it follows Morley from tomboy to one of the top-ranked bikini dancers on the circuit off the New Jersey Turnpike. The people around her get their own scenes: dancers she worked with, the gay roommate who helped her find her feminine side, and a bouncer with some unusual advice. Along the way she asks what the job is doing to the rest of her life.
Morley started go-go dancing in 1993 while trying to make it as an actress, and wrote the show in the dressing rooms. She first put it up herself at the Westbank Café, took it to the HBO Workspace in Los Angeles and solo festivals around the country, and later ran it for more than a year at the Red Room at KGB in the East Village. The play was published in Women Playwrights: The Best Plays of 1998, and a Lifetime movie followed in 2008.
Obie Award winner Dan Wackerman, part of the team behind that East Village run, directs. Choreography is by Jo Weldon, and Morley is the assistant director. BroadwayWorld reports that Frances is joined onstage by dancers Andrew Adubsa and Sydney Langford, with additional choreography by Ashe Turner, sets and lighting by Harry Feiner and costumes by Vox Populi. Davin Productions and JP Martin Theatricals present.
The show runs about 75 minutes, and the venue has a two-drink minimum. Tickets are sold through the Triad Theater.
