Julie Atlas Muz & Mat Fraser: Reinvent a Fabled Couple NSFW-style

A Beauty and a Beast, but This One’s for Adults

Julie Atlas Muz and Mat Fraser Reinvent a Fabled Couple

NYT Critics' Pick By BEN BRANTLEY

Beauty and the Beast Julie Atlas Muz and Mat Fraser unfold a bona fide X-rated fairy tale at the Abrons Arts Center.

Grown-ups of New York, are you ready to be told the best bedtime story you’ve heard since you were a credulous tyke? It’s called “Beauty and the Beast.” And yeah, I know what you’re thinking: You’ve heard that one before; your daughter made you watch the Disney movie with her like 28 times; and if you wanted something more sophisticated, you’d just slip on your digitally enhanced edition of Jean Cocteau’s “La Belle et La Bête” from 1946.

But, honest, you’ve never met a Beauty and Beast like the couple delivering their idea of story hour — not to mention an impressive variety of sexual positions — at the Abrons Arts Center through March 30. Our immortal title characters are being portrayed by the performance artists Julie Atlas Muz and Mat Fraser, a husband and wife who met while working in a sideshow on Coney Island.

On the surface, I have little in common with Mr. Fraser and Ms. Muz. I have no experience in burlesque (like the Detroit-born Ms. Muz) or a visible physical deformity (like the British-born Mr. Fraser, who was born with what he calls “small and perfectly deformed arms”), and I have spent no time at all since my infancy on public display in the altogether. Yet I found myself personally involved with and moved by this “Beauty and the Beast” in ways I never had been before. Odds are you’ll feel the same way.

The puppeteers Jonny Dixon and Jess Mabel Jones providing the hands for Mat Fraser, center.

Sweet are the uses of enchantment. Under the direction of the extravagantly imaginative Phelim McDermott, who staged Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha” at the Metropolitan Opera, Mr. Fraser and Ms. Muz unfold a bona fide fairy tale for adults that — unlike most latter-day examples of that genre — is neither dark and cynical nor precious and coy.

Early in the show, Ms. Muz, wearing a shiny curve-hugging black dress and glittery lipstick, asks her audience to “remember when you were smaller, younger and considerably wiser.” Now, in hindsight, this statement might seem a tad disingenuous, given that much of what follows is, by conventional standards, X-rated raunchy.

But in telling the parallel stories of Ms. Muz and Mr. Fraser and their archetypal, centuries-old characters, this “Beauty and the Beast” is infused with an all-accepting innocence. And it speaks to perhaps the only moments in our adult lives when we truly believe in magical fairy-tale transformations — those times when we’re drunk with new love, and the only prospect you can see is that of happily-ever-after-dom.

Not that Mr. Fraser and Ms. Muz are altogether dewy creatures. Professed outlaws seldom are. She’s a feminist stripper. (If you want to know what that means, she provides us with a snippet of a fabulous horror-movie routine she’s known for.) And he has spent his life aware that he looks different from most human beings, because of his chest-length arms. (His mother took Thalidomide while pregnant with him.)

Arms become a sly leitmotif in this production, which is designed with airy wit by Philip Eddolls (set), Kevin Pollard (costumes) and Ed Clarke (sound). The charming supporting cast of two puppeteers, Jess Mabel Jones and Jonny Dixon, use their own arms to fill in, as it were, for Mr. Fraser’s, when he’s playing the Beast in his incarnation as the Prince.

Mr. Fraser’s custom-made prosthetic arms — which he says he rarely uses (though they helped him win a male striptease contest) — are deployed to ingeniously distorting effect by the other performers. Such arm play teases and confuses the eye, and it shakes our set notions of just what a well-proportioned body is supposed to look like.

Trompe-l’oeil abounds here, in diverse forms. These include the captivating use of that old schoolroom dinosaur, the overhead projector, to tell Beauty’s back story as a sort of shadow play.

Various flora and fauna are summoned into being out of tissue paper. And following a sensual “Tom Jones”-style banquet, we are treated to a rousing erotic pas de deux between a zucchini and a melon.

Both Beauty and her Beast wear the kinds of costumes that slip off in a second to reveal only skin beneath. (Their half-dressed dance sequence is sweet and hilarious.) And there’s nothing left to the imagination as to how these fantasy figures spend their honeymoon. 

But the overall impression is anything but smutty — or arch, which would be worse. These couplings seem, well, happy and funny and un-self-conscious, in the ways I presume the old nudie review “Oh! Calcutta!” tried to be but evidently was not.

Be assured that the only audience participation comes early in the show, and all it asks of you is that you all bark like dogs. Those collective yelps, cued by an autobiographical monologue by Ms. Muz, become the aural backdrop for Beauty’s first journey through the dangerous forest.

What a privilege to be a part of this theatrical sorcery. From that moment, your heart is on the stage — if it weren’t already — with Beauty, Beast and their portrayers. It’s a leap that feels an awful lot like falling in love.