'MADNESS' HAS RAW, UNREFINED IMPACT

Growing up in Concord, Tommy Foster was one of the good kids. He went
to church. He wore glasses. He did theater. Offered a drink or a
cigarette, Tommy just said no.

But by his mid-20s, this aspiring actor was selling his body,
shooting up crystal meth and contemplating suicide. And then he
tested positive for HIV.

Foster's one-man cabaret show, "The METHod to my MADness," offers
only hints as to how the life of this clean-cut Southern boy so
rapidly came to illustrate two growing, and related, public health
crises: the alarming rates of HIV transmission among young gay men
and the scourge of crystal meth in urban, rural and now suburban
communities across the United States. A toxic, highly potent form of
the stimulant methamphetamine, crystal meth is overwhelmingly
addictive and, thanks to its ease of manufacture, readily available.

The performance at Actor's Theatre of Charlotte is one part musical
revue, one part public service announcement and two parts personal
expose -- a potent mix that mirrors the "recipe" for crystal meth
revealed on one of the cautionary posters that adorn the "METHod"
set. (Sinus medication, paint thinner and Drano are among the
ingredients poured into a scary-looking martini glass, a "cup of
poison" like another Foster sings about.)

The actor's steps to hell and back reverberate in a series of show
tunes, both classic (Cole Porter's "Love for Sale") and contemporary
(Andrew Lippa's songs from "The Wild Party," Adam Guettel's "How
Glory Goes" from "Floyd Collins"). The songs' moods match Foster's
feelings of isolation, disillusionment and loss, and their lyrics
present still more striking parallels.

Foster opens, for instance, with "Heaven on Their Minds" from "Jesus
Christ Superstar," whose ominous lines -- "Listen, Jesus, to the
warning I give/Please remember that I want us to live" -- take on a
new meaning in this context. And he closes with "How Did We Come to
This?" from "The Wild Party," whose bitter observations of people
"Filling up with frenzy/Killing with a kiss" perfectly capture the
collision between crystal meth and HIV in the gay subculture.

With "When the Earth Stopped Turning," from William Finn's "Elegies,"
Foster recalls the loss of a beloved grandmother; and with Guettel's
"How Glory Goes," he shows how he once yearned for death himself.

Foster calls the show "an evening of raw musical theater," and it is
- -- both raw in the emotional sense, as Foster revisits some pretty
harrowing places, and raw in the sense of unfinished. Foster gives us
a capsule history of methamphetamine, which is fascinating as far as
it goes; but the monologue trails off, and viewers are left to fill
in the blanks both in this saga and in Foster's.

The show's staging, too, could be more refined. Chip Decker has
designed an intimate but hard-edged playing space that Foster never
entirely owns. The low-tech video that intermittently fills four
screens behind him has its moments (we like seeing Foster's sweetly
nerdy schoolboy photos), but it's more often just a distraction.

With 16 showstoppers sung back-to-back, the program is a vocal
marathon -- and Foster, talented as he is, seems to have trained for
a 10K. But even when his tenor falters, the actor holds us; in fact,
if we had the sense that "METHod" were easy to perform, the hour
would lose much of its impact.

REVIEW

The METHod to my MADness

Concord native Tommy Foster relives his addiction to crystal meth in
"an evening of raw musical theater." Mature content. About 1 hour.

WHEN: 9 p.m. today and Thursday, Friday and July 16.

WHERE: Actor's Theatre of Charlotte, 650 E. Stonewall St. ADMISSION:

$20.

DETAILS: (704) 342-2251 or www.actorstheatrecharlotte.org