WEDNESDAY, MAY 12, 1999

Blue Palm pokes fun at pre-millenial hype

By John Putman

On-Line Forty-Niner

Blue Palm, a husband-and-wife performance duo, is the antidote to the pre-millennium hype and the insidious dominance of high technology in one's daily life.

The duo performed Friday night at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center, delivering their incisive comedic presentation, "Millennium Stories," which satirized these inflated themes.

Blue Palm, consisting of Jackie Planeix and Tom Crocker, accomplished this with the timely theatrical delivery expected of two entertainers who know each other intimately, through exaggerated dancing routines and, most importantly, through colorful character sketches and witty dialogue.

Blue Palm was accompanied by the accomplished Millennium Minutemen jazz band - saxophonist Michael Rose, drummer Russell Bizzett, bassist Glen Mont and guitarist Fred Sokolow, who added an appropriately avant-garde element to the duo's sparse, minimalist staging.

The dominant theme of the seven short pieces, which all take place between two characters on the eve of the new millennium, was how people's fascination with high technology has threatened their individuality and imagination.

In "Mindwalk," a young man seeks a peaceful, solitary communion with the stars in the Mojave Desert, but his desire to rid himself of material possessions for an unadorned celebration of the next 1,000 years turns out to be more difficult than he thinks.

In "Mosque-ito," in part a celebration of multiculturalism and a satire of new age philosophy, a devout Shiite Muslim confronts a naive American woman in a Turkish mosque.

He alternately describes the pantheistic new age priestess as a "heathen and a kook" and an "absent soul with an American Express card."

Nonetheless, he becomes enamored of her and invites her to a New Year's Eve party at the Japanese Embassy.

The program closed profoundly with "100 in 2000," in which an angel visits a 100-year-old man in a Florida retirement home.

Shocked that a messenger of death may be upon him, the old man exclaims, "Are you with Kevorkian?"

Perhaps so, for in seeking to reconnect [him] with [his] soul, the gentle angel escorts him to heaven in an elegant duet of sardonic ballet.

Here, as elsewhere, Blue Palm's marriage of wit, feeling and satire brings the subject into endearing focus.