But in fact, this sharp and spiffy new show is brighter and better crafted than both "The Rocky Horror Show" and "Grease" put together.  And it introduces the kind of unspoiled but already professional new talent that our somnolent, revival-choked musical stage so desperately needs.

As written by John Dempsey, with consistent logic and tone, "Zombie Prom" happens dead center in Eisenhower American - the Fifties of J. Edgar Hoover morality, Confidential Magazine and bouffant hairdos.  The setting is "Enrico Fermi High School," named for the father of the atom bomb.  The cast of characters is out of Archie and Veronica comics: eight students plus the principal, Delilah Strict, and the editor of a scandal magazine - Eddie Flagrante.  These names are not meant to be funny, but rather, to be "funny," mocking what used to be funny in the 1950s.  A world that the show's witty designers - wets by James Youmans, costumes by Gregg Barnes - so cunningly replicate.

Our heroine, Toffee (all the girls have sweet names) has a crush on Jonny, who is so rebellious he has taken the "H" out of his Biblical name, offending the morality of the school principal.  When Toffee, bowing to parental and peer pressures, breaks up with him, Jonny takes a flying leap into the nearby Frances Gary Powers Nuclear Plant.  His radioactive body is buried at sea in a concrete coffin.  Toffee becomes "a teen-ager in
morning," but Jonny comes back from the dead as a "nuclear zombie" - comes back, as he so earnestly says, "to graduate."

All of this attracts the interest of the scandal sheet editor, Flagrante, who "prints the facts behind the lies" but refuses to print anything negative about Nixon or Hoover.  Jonny insists that "beneath all the gangrene I'm basically good," and indeed he is.  At least Richard Roland, who plays him, is - good at singing, dancing and comic acting.

Good, too, are Richard Muenz as Flagrante and, in the most demanding role, Karen Murphy as Delilah.  She does occasionally indulge the show's surface invitation to mug, putting her too much in the "Grease" style, but she handles her songs extremely well and stops the show at least once.

Those songs, and virtually the entire score, are perhaps the happiest surprise.  Writing music so extensive it sometimes plays as through composed in the Webber manner, composer Dana P. Rowe has used musical satire as a creative basis.  These are not mere spoofs of the Neil Sedaka/Carole King style.  Mr. Rowe has added his own musical wit,
along with and occasional, sneaky touch of compositional daring.  And his "Zombie Prom" finale is breathtakingly catchy with its rich melodies, touches of dissonance and quirky time count.
 

The lyrics that have been set to it by Mr. Dempsey are very well crafted, always metric and neatly rhymed, generally moving the story along and sometimes positively brilliant.  Mr. Dempsey's humor is true to the show's deadpan style ("You'd be a widow," Toffee is told, should she marry her zombie boy friend, "before you're wed").  It is also politically satiric ("Where do you stand on the rights of the dead?").  Most importantly, Dempsey's lyrics are always singable and support the music while resting comfortably on it.

The constancy of material, performance and production is of course due, in large part, to the controlling hand of director Philip Wm. McKinley, who has made certain that the show's style and tempo are crisp.  Fortunate to have Tony Stevens' witty dances, McKinley has assembled a cast rich in musical stage experience.  All of that shows.  "Zombie Prom" is a breath of freshness and vitality, and exhilarating sign of spring and renewed life in today's musical landscape of spectacles and revivals.

It even has a secret weapon lacking in LITTLE SHOP: Karen Murphy.  As Delilah Strict, the shrill, shapely, storm-trooping principal of Enrico Fermi High, she makes Dorothy Loudon's Miss Hannigan look like a wilted wallflower.  She struts.  She quivers. She pops her eyes.  She emotes with every pore.  She screams through clenched teeth--try that sometime.  She reels with near-orgasmic pleasure as her scared-submissive students recite the school's show-stopping credo of "Rules, Regulations, and Respect."  It's not camp; it's just very strenuous musical-comedy acting by a diva of tomorrow.  As Murphy gets bigger and broader, she gets funnier -- by Act Two she was earning applause on every entrance and exit.  Long may she glower. 

Enrico Fermi High is  atomic-powered, and so, it seems, is the show.  It radiates enough energy to level the East Village.  The story, a wisp about a high school rebel who hurls himself into a nuclear reactor, only to emerge as an undead green slimy thing, is an excuse for riffing on '50s conventions, keeping the cast in perpetual dancing motion, and parading one outrageous getup after another.  There's enough taffeta to wallpaper the Louvre.  Typical of this genre, the design is comic-book, the colors electric, the score a knowing pastiche.  The young lovers, Jonny (we know he's a rebel because he left out the "h") and Toffee, deem their love "as destined as a sunset when the credits start to roll," to a shaboop-shaboop rhythm.  And when the lovesick Toffee (Jessica Snow Wilson, just the right name for her) sings a lament to her teddy bear, there's a mad gleam in her eye; she's Olivia Newton-John gone bonkers after smiling too hard.

Composer Dana P. Rowe knows his way around a doo-wop, and he and  librettist/lyricist John Dempsey even indulge in a bit of Gilbert-and-Sullivan rhyming-couplet-exposition.  Ambitiously, the piece is nearly through-composed, but so in so unpretentious and ingratiating a fashion that you scarcely notice.  The lyrics sometimes try a little too hard ("Where once that child was effervescent/She's now a poster-child depressant"), but they also earn honest guffaws.  And wherever they can, the authors drop in a note of relevance.  When Delilah is outraged to see a zombie in Enrico Fermi's scared halls, she threatens to cancel all afterschool activities.  Shades of Salt Lake City!  Who says a nostalgia epic can't  be contemporary?

Tony Stevens' choreography and Philip Wm. McKinley's direction barely give the audience a chance to catch its breath, much less the cast.  All ten toil mightily and mostly succeed.  I especially enjoyed Rebecca Rich's Candy, a hefty '50s teen with the good cheer and fleet feet of Ricki Lake in her HAIRSPRAY days.  Playing and Elvis-like scandal-sheet columnist, the reliable Richard Muenz is stranded with subpar material in Act One, but he sparkles in Act Two when he and old flame Delilah recall their tempestuous days in art school: "There we knew no restraints/Dripping with tempera paints."

With four or five show-stoppers, several funny lines, and a carefree anarchic spirit that makes GREASE look elephantine, this is a brisk and mindlessly diverting as a cartoon retro-musical gets.  And now that the bash-the '50s genre has reached it's apex, let's retire it.