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Karaokeapocalypse: The Monster Plays 1-4

Reviewed by Bill Raden

Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre

Through April 10

It’s hard to imagine a theater other than Zombie Joe’s Underground that would go anywhere near writer-director-performer Richie Werner’s late-night evenings of anarchic, freeform punk-rock “puppet horror” cabaret. In fact, the fast-and-loose and highly camped pitch of Karaokeapocalypse: The Monster Plays 1-4 channels a raucous, tongue-in-cheek, anything-goes performance sensibility that was prevalent in the downtown club and after-hours party scenes of the 1980s and ‘90s on both coasts, although without the sex and drugs or opening bands.

Featuring a rotating pickup company of ZJU all-stars (Monster Play 2 included Vanessa Cate, Redetha Deason, Ian Heath, Sebastian Munoz and Jana Wimer in cadaverous whiteface), Karoakeapocalypse fully lives up to the first half of its portmanteau title. Around a dozen mostly improvised production numbers feature Werner, who looks like — and shares an antic stage vibe with — Flea from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers (but with younger hair), singing lead vocals to a string of more-or-less obscure goth, rockabilly, swing, R&B and novelty records in a playlist that puts the emphasis on cult (and unreels like an episode of the old Dr. Demento show).

The “puppetry” on display is of the archly sardonic kind that might well set the late Bob Baker spinning in his grave. Monster Play 2’s opener, in which Werner sings the Lou Reed vocals from “My Name is Mok,” a track from the 1983 animated musical Rock & Rule, had a procession of black light-lit company members ritually remove a DayGlo Barbie from a box and disappear behind a corrugated-cardboard skull painting. A later number, set to Klaus Nomi’s mock operatic “The Cold Song,” featured a ghoulish, rubber-masked ax murderer delivering a string of bloody, decapitated doll heads onstage and then dragging a screaming live performer off.

And while those descriptions might not raise an eyebrow among ZJU cognoscenti, Werner’s rather relaxed, low-fi, under-rehearsed stage aesthetic does perilously flirt with the tossed-off, not to mention the lower limits of what actually constitutes a rehearsed performance for which one may conscientiously charge an admission.

But any show that stitches together music from such ostensibly disparate sources as The Hives (“Puppet on a String”), Tom Waits (“Poor Edward”), Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (“There’s Something Wrong With You”), the Henry Hull Orchestra (“The Teddy Bear’s Picnic”), Roger Klug (“Bim Bam Boom”) and The Fuzztones (“Ward 81”) must be doing something right.

And that assertion was borne out by Monster Play 2 in both the visually striking “choreography” of its haunted forest number (set to Rowland S. Howard and Lydia Lunch’s “I Fell in Love With a Ghost”) as well as a surprisingly sweet duet between Werner and Elizabeth Liang on the Dean & Britta ballad “Eyes in My Smoke.”

Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre, 4850 Lankershim Blvd., N. Hlywd.; Fri., 11 p.m.; through April 10. (818) 202-4120, zombiejoes.tix.com.