Homecoming Queen’s Got a Musical

Review by Bill Raden

It is said that the Golden Age can only ever be viewed clearly in the rearview mirror. That when one is actually living in the moment of an era — any era — everything always seems ordinary and somewhat ugly. Phidias and Euripides probably thought as much of Pericles’ Athens.

 Just don’t try selling that to 1980s survivor, M-TV icon and musical-satire writer Julie Brown or her co-scribe and director Kurt Koehler, who set up camp squarely in the decade that gave us the second-worst president of the 20^th Century (Ronald Regan, just behind Warren G. Harding), the Hollywood insipidity of the two Johns (Landis & Hughes), and a fashion sensibility that can be summed up in two hair products (Aquanet and the teasing comb).

 Homecoming Queen’s Got a Musical is as much a sendup of the jukebox stage musical (another regrettable spawn of the ‘80s) as it is a parody of the pernicious perkiness of the decade’s ear-curdling top-40 pop charts that it freely mines to power a paper-thin lampoon of teen and horror movies that mostly plays as a half-mash-up of Heathers and Carrie.

 In Brown and Koehler’s reckoning, the 1980s are a patent cultural absurdity overripe for skewering. And the hit-and-miss laughs generated by their featherweight burlesque — and an admittedly dynamite cast — sporadically bear the writers out.

 Both co-star Drew Droege’s drag impersonation of a demonically-possessed high school Homecoming Queen candidate and Brown’s puddle-deep ditz of a sidekick manage to hold their own against standouts that include Beth Crosby and Natalie Landers (as a sneering clique of villainous cheerleaders), Sam Pancake (as Brown’s hilarious, hat-making and fish taco-hating boyfriend), Jacquelyn Denning (as the school’s Carrie-like untouchable), and Chris Pudlo (as Droege’s smart-as-mud jock beau).

 Choreographer Joseph Corella-Sandler contributes some wittily ‘80s-specific production numbers — most notably in the music-video-inspired “Welcome to the Home Room” — but it is the uncannily period thrift store finds by the show’s un-credited costumer that really nails down the decade’s coffin lid.

That said, Brown and Koehler’s broad book and cardboard caricatures plainly don’t have the wherewithal to go the distance of the evening’s two hours. Long before intermission, the song parodies begin to seem redundant and the story over-familiar and underwritten. Their material would be twice as funny at half the length and perhaps even sidesplitting as the five-minute, non-musical comedy sketch that it was probably meant to be. —Bill Raden

Cavern Club Theater inside Casita Del Campo, 1920 Hyperion Ave., Silver Lake; Fri.-Sat., 9 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m., through April 13. https://juliebrown.tix.com/Schedule.aspx?OrgNum=4548 or www.juliebrown.com