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ZOMBIE
PROM!
Reviews
By Martin
Gottfried
and
Marc
Miller
"ZOMBIE PROM"
reviewed by Martin Gottfried
for the New York Law Journal
To pre-judge from its title, "Zombie Prom" might
have been emulating "The Rocky Horror Show," the campy, long-running
cult musical. Then, as the lights go up on its opening number, the
new musical appears to be going after something simpler, a spoof of the
fifties in a high school/rock and roll setting, much like "Grease."
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.
"ZOMBIE PROM"
reviewed by Marc Miller
for STAGES: The National Theatre Magazine/Summer
1996
If you can stomach one more let's-make-fun-of-the-'50s
musical romp, make it this one. Sly, irreverent, and resolutely over the
top, it looks and plays a lot like LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS on speed.
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.
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