Perfect people are rarely very interesting, which is why they hardly ever appear onstage. In order to get around that, playwrights will hand their characters a very specifically calibrated mix of flaws, both to cause the plot trouble in the first place and to make the character grow into a more interesting shape. Both laughter and tears, after all, come from things that aren’t quite the way they should be.
In comedy, of course, the simplest flaws tend to be obliviousness and/or stupidity, and classically square-jawed hero Hercules seems the perfect candidate for both. In Desert Star Playhouse’s “Hunk-cules: I’m Too Sexy For My Toga,” running at the Salt Lake dinner theater August 11 through September 24, the brawny but not exactly brainy Hercules must figure out how to use his muscles to accomplish impossible tasks, defeat the evil queen Medea, and win the heart of the princess Lisa Marie (tickets are available online). Those tasks range from defeating the three-headed Chimera to the much less glamorous cleaning out of an entire palace (hopefully for Hercules, there’s no royal teenagers in residence).
The play is a variant on the theater’s 1998 show, “Hercules: It’s All Greek to Me,” which was written by Beth Bruner & Norman E. Plate(the current show is adapted from that script by Scott Holman. Bodybuilder and former Mr. Utah Rick Miller, who played Hercules in the original show, will be reprising his role here.
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