Elvis Presley, may he rest in peace, would have turned 84 this month. To celebrate, his toilet is throwing him a party.
Astro Pop Events’ ninth annual Elvis’ Birthday Fight Club, which will be staged Friday and Saturday at GALA Hispanic Theatre and next weekend in Baltimore, is perhaps D.C.’s wackiest tradition. The satiric, irreverent underground fight club blends seven rounds of fisticuffs with outrageous costumes, below-the-belt humor, and burlesque routines, attracting a cult-following of audience members who attend every year.
“It’s theater minus or burlesque plus, depending how you come into the space,” says writer-performer Andrew Wodzianski, who portrays the aforementioned toilet. “We do some remarkably silly—highfalutin people would argue avant garde—pretty surreal match-ups of celebrities combatting one another, and between fights, we have remarkably beautiful people taking off their clothes.”
Producer Kate Taylor Davis says that despite the show’s longevity, she can still only take a stab at describing it. “It’s staged combat with ridiculous concepts, characters, ideals—just crazy shit,” she says. She’s convinced good friends to come, aware that, even once they’ve entered the theater, they typically have no idea what to expect. “And I’ll see them at intermission and say, ‘Did I describe it OK?’ And they’re like, ‘We’re kind of in shock, but we’re definitely coming back next year.’’’
The show’s origins trace back nearly a decade, when Davis and her husband, Jared—who stars as Elvis in the show—decided to partner with friends on a burlesque event. They booked the former Warehouse Theatre for a date in January that they later realized happened to be Elvis’ birthday. While brainstorming concepts for the show, they decided they might as well incorporate the King—they were all fans anyway and even owned two Elvis costumes. A group riffing session that followed generated ideas like an Elvis luau or Elvis cat fight; both were dismissed quickly. Then someone suggested an Elvis fight club, and the Davises couldn’t help falling in love (sorry).
Much of the show had already been written when inspiration struck on how to tie all the myriad elements together. And it involved a porcelain throne (Presley died after being found unresponsive in his bathroom in 1977 at age 42). “The idea is that Elvis’ toilet is putting this on for him because he heard the King’s last dying wish was that he wanted a fight club for his birthday,” Davis says. “And he has limited resources, so that’s why it’s a little shabby.” Wodzianski, who happened to be nearby when the need for a latrine arose, immediately volunteered his services. Though he’s portrayed dozens of characters since the show premiered in 2011, his tenure as the toilet—named Commodious—has remained consistent.
On the night of the irreverent show, Commodious first appears to introduce the event and explain what’s to come, and reemerges at the top of the second act. At that point, audience members are invited to participate in the “quaalaise toss,” which translates to lobbing larger-than-life Styrofoam pills at Commodious. (Quaalaise is a fictitious mixture of Quaaludes and mayonnaise—a special dressing that Davis imagines Elvis might have added to his beloved peanut butter and banana sandwiches. “It was just a silly line we wrote,” she says.)
“It’s fascinating to see it from stage,” Wodzianski says. “I have 250 intoxicated theater patrons hurling Styrofoam pills at me, trying to get one into the toilet bowl.” Inevitably, a handful reach their target; Each pill is marked with a number, and Elvis extracts them to choose one winner, who goes home with a Velvet Elvis painted by Jared Davis.
The quaalaise toss is a fan favorite, but this is, after all, a fight club, and the cartoon-like, choreographed combat steals the show. The fight card isn’t revealed until the performance begins, but past matchups have included Queen’s Freddy Mercury vs. the Queen of England, Vladimir Putin vs. a unicorn, Elton John vs. Kim Jong-un, My Little Pony vs. Leatherface, and Al Franken vs. Harvey Weinstein. Following their bout last year, Franken and Weinstein fused into the Franken-[Wein]Stein monster—depicted by a couple dozen oversized penises protruding from an ugly sweater—to battle a vagina. The vagina, portrayed by three men draped in a shimmering pink sheet, was declared the evening’s winner, which Davis highlights as one of her favorite moments yet. It underscores a tenet of Elvis’ Birthday Fight Club, she says: Yes, it’s silly and it’s lowbrow, but don’t dismiss the show as meaningless entertainment.
“We love the very obvious funny, and if we have an option between kicking someone in the nuts or not, we’re going to do it,” Davis says. “But there’s also the underneath subtext,” which includes paying homage to timely, significant issues, like the #MeToo movement.
Perhaps that’s one reason the wacky mashup resonates so well. Each year, “Elvis” asks audience members how many times they’ve attended, and the theater is consistently filled with people who come again and again. “It’s grown such long and strong legs,” Wodzianski says. “It’s become this very peculiar cult production that has this small legion of veterans who come back every year to see the show. It’s gonzo; it’s a night of zaniness, and a wonderful opportunity to bring some surreal and cerebral humor to the New Year.”
Elvis’ Birthday Fight Club will be performed at GALA Hispanic Theatre on Friday at 8 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. and Saturday at 7 p.m. (sold out) and 9:30 p.m. (sold out); and at Creative Alliance in Baltimore on Jan. 11 at 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. and Jan. 12 at 7 p.m. (sold out) and 9:30 p.m. Tickets are $25-$35.
