At Cleveland State University he majored in business for two years “until I flunked trigonometry three times.” In 1973, trailing a girlfriend, he drove cross-country to California to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and found his life’s purpose in performance. The oldest boy among six children (a seventh died in childhood), Fleck was raised in a blue-collar, Roman Catholic Cleveland household. In relatively calmer moments, his rubbery, handsome features (think Dustin Hoffman crossed with Geoffrey Rush) resolve themselves into a default expression of benign amusement. Tall and trim, thanks to a daily regimen of exercise and yoga, he moves with the manic grace of a silent-screen clown. He’s got a lot of heart under everything he does.”įor a man accused by the Washington establishment of committing acts of cultural terrorism, Fleck in person comes across as strikingly sweet-natured and boyishly eager to please. “This piece is probably one of the most vulnerable pieces that he’s ever done,” Montejano says. Dancing, vamping, spewing motor-mouthed monologues, mugging in mirrors and emitting high-pitched operatic shrieks, Fleck fashions a psychological burlesque show that channels Garland’s ghost while rekindling affectionate, traumatic memories of his Alzheimer’s-racked mother, Josephine, who died several years ago and appears in spectral video projections.įleck’s well aware that, for some people, the mere words “Judy Garland” will conjure visions of “another bad drag thing.” But he hopes his show about the legendary diva, rampaging onstage and backstage at the Cocoanut Grove, may untangle some of the unhealthy ties that bind a performer to an audience, or a dysfunctional parent to a needy child.
“Mad Women” jump-cuts between one of Garland’s last live concert performances as a haunted, slurry-voiced, tragicomic figure, surrounded by an adoring throng of “men in tight pants” (Fleck’s phrase) and Fleck’s own anxious theatrical coming-out party as a 9-year-old boy at an Ohio kiddie talent show. In “Mad Women,” Fleck awakens the demons of drug abuse and marital dysfunction that tortured Garland late in life, and transformed the ardent, fresh-faced young heroine of “The Wizard of Oz” and “Meet Me in St. If parts of his life and his polymorphously perverse art are the stuff of legal history, Fleck sees an odd parallel with the history, and histrionics, of another performer: Judy Garland. And I got out of the house, went to Europe, by myself. But then I discovered David Bowie and Lou Reed. And because I did that, hated me even more, because that was not what he wanted. “I had one of the longest-running roles in childhood history, of the perfect son,” Fleck says during a rehearsal break. His mother, a homemaker, loved movies and show tunes, and stuck by her son when the old man went on one of his alcohol-abetted rages. His carpenter father, Fleck says, was a handsome, charismatic “big ol’ macho guy” who wanted his son to be successful with money and women. In Fleck’s latest one-man show, “Mad Women,” which he conceived, wrote and is performing at the Skylight Theatre, the nakedness is mainly of the emotional variety, and it’s putting the actor in touch with two people who helped propel his outlandish, and improbably accomplished, career: his parents. He’s not even naked in the ho-hum, non-transgressive style that now pervades mainstream pop culture, where Fleck has put in regular appearances in such family-friendly and almost-family-friendly fare as “Star Trek: Enterprise,” “Carnivale” and “Weeds.”
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