‘Tonya’: Everything was (far from) beautiful at skating rink

And you thought politics was a brutal, back-stabbing game. Think again. Or let “Tonya & Nancy: The Rock Opera,” now in its Chicago premiere by the Underscore Theatre Company, take you back to the early 1990s, when two contenders in the high-stakes world of women’s figure skating — Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan — grabbed more tabloid headlines than they did championship medals.

It was a time when the blades on one’s skates not only needed to be knife-sharp, but the ability to nail those triple axel jumps was essential for anyone intending to nail the competition to the skating rink wall.

The driving energy behind this musical, which features a book and lyrics by Elizabeth Searle (who first wrote about the skaters in her novella “Celebrities in Disgrace”) and music by Michael Teoli (a Los Angeles-based film and theater composer), is a delicious one. But while there are some wonderfully larger-than-life performances in the show, the whole thing butterfly jumps far too heavily into unrelenting campiness. And under director-choreographer Jon Martinez and music director Aaron Benham, the overall presentation is so shrill (with the expert band amplified far beyond necessary, and often overwhelming the performers) that the production frequently sacrifices what could be genuinely poignant moments for louder-than-a-bomb crassness.

Of course the story, which follows Tonya and Nancy from the 1991 U.S. Skating Championships in Minneapolis to the two women’s climactic face-off at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, is the stuff of Jerry Springer-like sensationalism, with the headline-grabbing scandal forever associated with their names occurring in 1994, just seven weeks before the Olympics. That is when, at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Detroit, Nancy was clubbed in the right knee with a police baton by a guy “hired” by Tonya’s (by then) ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, and co-conspirator Shawn Eckardt, in what became known as “the whack heard round the world.”

On the surface, the two skaters could be seen as polar opposites. One one end of the rink there is Tonya (Amanda Horvath, who not only has made herself a Tonya look-alike, but belts out every song with fire), the hardscrabble, truck-driving girl with the athletic style who grew up in an Oregon trailer park, has a tough, selfish, vulgar mother (Veronica Garza) who continually degrades her daughter, a father who walked away, and a thuggish loser of a boyfriend/husband, Gillooly (Justin Adair), who figures he can hitch himself to her success. On the other there is Nancy (Courtney Mack, who captures the sad-sack, often self-defeating aspect of her character), who comes from a comfortable Massachusetts home, possesses an “American sweetheart” look and demeanor, and wins plaudits for her elegant skating style, yet seems to have led a protected and rather lonely life, pressured by a mother (Garza again) who has put all her hopes into her daughter’s success.

As it happens, in some ways they are not all that different. In addition to their ever-present mothers, both women have something to prove. And both have spent years training and competing, yet rarely talk of their love for skating, which seems to have been erased by all the emotional pressures that come with winning.

It is a stroke of brilliance to have the mothers of both women played by the same actress, and Garza is a persona-shifting hoot (with, not surprisingly, far more to draw on when it comes to Tonya’s mom). But in many ways the show-stopping moment comes when Adair, in a total about-face from the sort of characters he usually plays, uses his sensational voice, guitar-playing skills and dance moves to give us a sly “interior” portrait of Gillooly that is downright Brechtian in its contradictions.

The occasional suggestion of skating in the show is finessed with tongue-in-cheek bluntness as a male member of the ensemble lifts Tonya into her axels. (The ensemble includes Caleb Baze, Vasily Deris, Tyler Symonè Franklin, Graham Hawley, Genevieve Perrino and Mari Uchida.)

To be fully reminded of the “three and a half minutes in which to be perfect,” you had best turn to YouTube clips of the real thing. In the meantime, there is some fun to be had with this decidedly imperfect musical which might have the judges rating it with a five.