Lenny Haas, Mary McCool and Erik Ransom played fifteen gender-bending characters in Greg Giovanni's underground classic, presented as part of the Big-Messy Retro-Fest honoring the playwright’s twenty-year career as Philly’s resident provocateur. Director Madi Distefano, who performed with Giovanni during the sold-out run of the 2001 Philly Fringe, helmed a fully re-imagined staging for Brat’s entry in the 2008 Fest. A tale of world domination and personal loss told with Giovanni's signature blend of surrealism, absurdism, cabaret, vaudeville, camp, farce and film noir, Cocktail injected lounge-lizard venom into shop-worn pop songs while gleefully dancing on the grave of theatrical realism.

From a review of Naked Cocktail in Theatre Journal, by Anthony Hostetter, PhD

Giovanni's punk influenced theatrical rant on our perceptions of the American stage amused the insider audience with many recognizable images of our absurd theatrical world. While we appreciated the talented performers in this production, we respected them more for their willingness to remove their masks of believable characters as they embarked on a challenging relay race through many absurd personae. This amazing display of athleticism highlighted Giovanni's anarchist world that challenges our perceptions of theater. This classic big mess theatre had so much dizzying action and cheap spectacle on stage that we soon realize that theatre does not need to take itself so seriously.