Duplex Cabaret
Stewart Benedict

Like June, a hit musical is bustin’ out all over.

Its title is THE BEST SEX OF THE XX CENTURY SALE by Lissa Moira and Richard West and it began earlier this year at the Theater for the New City, where it played to sold-out-houses. Now it is on view every Saturday at 8 p.m. in the Duplex Cabaret, 61 Christopher Street, through November 29, and at Danny’s Skylight Room, 346 West 46th Street every Wednesday at 9:15 p.m. through December 3 (except for Thanksgiving eve). But that’s not all: it will also be on view at the Triad, 158 West 72nd Street, on January 9 and 16 at 10:30 p.m.

What’s all the fuss about? Well, a man labeled the Carnival Barker offers a number of items for sale, all with sexual associations or connotations. He starts conservatively with a bustle and a moustache cup, which prompts a revised version of “A Bicycle Built for Two,” featuring the line, “Give me your hymen, do.” Then on to World War I, whose doughboys march onstage signing “Pack up your condoms in your old kit bag,” and the 1920s, including Emma Goldman’s date book (manless, of course) and Margaret Sanger’s diaphragm (outsize, as befits the founder of the American Birth Control League).

The 1930s bring Shirley Temple, toting her trademark lollipop as she warbles “on the good ship pedophile,” Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald cavorting in Italy and intoning “Three Groins in the Fountain,” the Duchess of Windsor, Mae West, and Vivian Leigh, who evidently complained constantly about Clark Gable’s bad breath in their love scenes, singing, “You made me leave you.”

The post WW II era brings Mia Farrow’s hair, a model on Marlon Brando’s motorcycle from “The Wild One,” and of course much attention to Marilyn Monroe, from whom there is a diary in which she explains Jack Kennedy’s version of the Monroe Doctrine and of course one of Joe DiMaggio’s balls.

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