“Everett Quinton personates the oinker as a most sympathetic fellow,” Don Nelsen wrote in a review in The Daily News.
The two had a sensational success in 1984 with Mr. Ludlam’s “The Mystery of Irma Vep” (the name is an anagram for “vampire”), a parody of Victorian penny dreadfuls in which they played all the roles, male and female, switching deftly and rapidly. (Mr. Quinton held down four — a maid, an aristocrat named Lord Edgar, a monster/vampire and a woman hidden in the manor house.)
“Each character is such a complete, precise comic creation that it often takes one’s breath away to watch the actors move from one role to the next (and back again) with nary a pause,” Frank Rich wrote in his review in The Times. “In ‘Irma Vep,’ Mr. Ludlam and Mr. Quinton have raised the Ridiculous to the sublime.”
Mr. Ludlam and Mr. Quinton performed the show more than 330 times. But it turned out to be the peak of Mr. Ludlam’s career — he died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1987. Mr. Quinton soldiered on with the Ridiculous theater, restaging some of Mr. Ludlam’s works while gradually expanding the offerings. By 1994, Mel Gussow, writing in The Times, found that Mr. Quinton had put his own stamp on the company.
“While respecting the theatrical legacy of his mentor and longtime companion,” Mr. Gussow wrote, “Mr. Quinton has given the company his own irreverent signature: Ludlamania has been Quintonized.”
He kept Ridiculous Theatrical going until 1997, by which time it had lost its Sheridan Square space and was, like other small theater companies, done in by high costs in an increasingly gentrifying part of town. Mr. Quinton, though, continued to direct and perform, including in “Drop Dead Perfect,” which played at the Theater at St. Clement’s in Manhattan in 2014 (and returned for an encore the next year).
“In a sweet 1950s peach crocheted dress and matching bolero, Everett Quinton has never looked lovelier,” Anita Gates began her review in The Times.
