Caruso and the Monkey House Trial

Writer Andrew G Marshall has enthusiastically stressed the parallels that his musical monologue, Caruso and the Monkey House Trial, has with Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s current bother. Yet the topicality of the sexual misconduct accusations tossed at tenor Enrico Caruso in 1906 rather makes this play’s trajectory feel like overly-trodden ground. The century’s first tabloid celebrity sex scandal, Caruso’s case is also fairly typical, involving questionable evidence, underlying racism and no one emerging clean-handed. 

Contemporary accounts of the incident—in which Caruso was accused of groping a woman in the monkey house of New York’s Central Park Zoo—paint the tenor as very much the victim. But Ignacio Jarquin’s one-man performance suggests a more ambiguous character, slipperily debonair and too earnestly desperate to be truly sympathetic. It’s clear why this is Jarquin’s second onstage incarnation of Caruso; he has fantastically expressive features and a devastating voice. Only when he uses the latter do you understand why a troop of managers and detectives rush to defend the virtuoso. Jarquin’s Caruso animates these supporting characters with hammy contempt as he tiresomely denies and denies the increasing accusations. 

Instead of confiding in his distant wife, Caruso identifies with Noki the monkey in what is the play’s most compelling analogy. During the prologue Jarquin eats a banana – and for its conclusion he squats atop a table like a primate. Caruso and the Monkey House Trial may say little original about celebrity sex scandals, but Marshall makes an intriguing satirical point about the status of performers.