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| Keep out of Reach of Children |
There's something militant about One Man Show, Roger Pellégrino's 1980 creation for the middle-shelf brand of Jacques Bogart. The battleship grey box. The olive green glass bottle, with even greener fluid inside. The way the brand's signature "b" glistens in brass like the cockade on a Russian soldier's cap. It all spells "Not for Children," as if Bogart execs wanted to convey a sense of inherent danger to anyone unprepared for what happens if you carelessly depress the atomizer.
I used to dislike this fragrance, but time has a way of wrestling men into submission, and after many recent developments in the fragrance world, I find myself face-down on the mat. Back when I had things like Kouros and Krizia Uomo to turn to, One Man Show was a pointless exercise in olfactory crass that lacked the compositional genius of the former or the material focus of the latter. If I wanted an animalic fougére fix, the animalis (civet, tonkin musk) of vintage Kouros was impossible to beat. For rich woods, look no further than the photorealistic cedar base of Krizia Uomo. Back in 2012, I wrote: "The calibration was inspired but simple, of equal parts pine and oakmoss, styrax and castoreum, incense and geranium, all tuned to a high-pitched shrill. It smells weirdly majestic . . . " And I agree with me—it certainly did smell weirdly majestic, but also intense, raw, rugged, and a bit scary, like the problem-drinking teacher who grips your arm a little too tightly after breaking up a schoolyard disturbance. One Man Show wasn't for the young'uns.
Today, Kouros is neutered and all but discontinued, Krizia Uomo is a dinosaur, and where can a guy go for a classic, early 1980s animalic punch in the nose? Come back, One Man Show, all is forgiven. I purchased a 100 milliliter bottle on eBay last month for $14.88, and I received it in a box stamped with an October, 2016 batch code—or maybe a 2006 batch code, since these codes tend to repeat every ten years. It came with a little dried-out and empty tube of aftershave balm, and from what I've heard they're always dried out, so naturally one must figure there's an obsessive-compulsive thief out there sitting on a vat of stolen One Man Show aftershave balm. The box warns: HIGHLY CONCENTRATED, and the bottle's black plastic atomizer sticks out from its cowl like the barrel of a gun. The text, "Jacques Bogart Paris" is printed in black, as if stamped, "Fit to Serve."
With some trepidation, I sprayed One Man Show for the first time in 14 years. I was hit with a bright burst of aldehydic greens, followed by a grassy accord of what mainly smells like basil, artemisia, galbanum, and a particularly harsh bergamot note that recalls the skanky citruses of past classics like Moustache and Aramis, except here it competes with all those grassier tones. There's also a hint of civetone, but there's an even stronger hint of castoreum, which foretells what is to come. The first ten minutes smells the most like Krizia Uomo, minus the obvious lavender and fougére elements, but as the castoreum note steps forward, this changes. The focus here isn't on cedar, although there is some cedar tucked away somewhere. No, this fragrance is about the musks. Animalis, castoreum, a surprisingly restrained wink of textural civetone, all blaring together in that familiar New Wave masculine "powerhouse" way that only something from 1980 can manage.
It's impossible to spray this stuff on and not immediately think of Phoebe Cates in a leotard. Fragrances like this were designed to bring out the inner animal in a man. It makes sense that the person who brought us Macassar and Gem would channel all the lusty stink of post-disco machismo into something as brutish and raw as Bogart's second masculine release. I've read from cognoscenti that current iterations of this formula neglect the animalics and naturals, but if so, my nose must be unaware of it, because this 9 (or 19) year-old bottle smells plenty old-school, natural, animalic, and mossy to me. There's no moss listed on the box, but if you know what it smells like, you know it's in there. Maybe they just, eh, forgot to alert the IFRA of its presence.
Does this stuff scratch the itch left behind by those other lost masterpieces? Kind of. Look, the further out we get from the 1980s, the more this sort of thing dazzles, even when it's as crudely done as it is here. Pellégrino perfected the animalic citrus accord in his later and much more refined Versace L'Homme (984), and if you squint with that one, you can sort of see the resemblance to One Man Show. I can settle for this fragrance when I want the animalic snarl that I used to get from Kouros, and it'll work in a pinch when I wish I had the piney-green ambiance of Krizia Uomo. But the rough edges of this monstrosity are such that wearing it will be an exercise in cringe-inducing caution. Don't want to get hurt, and certainly don't want to hurt others.
I work with a few people born in the 2000s, and spending more than 30 seconds around something this virile and overtly sexual might traumatize them. Lock the bottle in a safe, and memorize the combination. Little Johnny's not old enough to shoot yet.