The Mary Kay Letourneau Story: A Karaoke Musical

BEANIE BABY Letourneau’s student lover is quite young.

This brave effort from Gorilla Tango infuses it’s-too-crazy-to-be-made-up source material with pathos and character development, providing a low-budget reminder of how compelling sketch comedy can be. Yet, while the show expertly mixes story with funny, it suffers from an identity crisis of sorts; the frequent alternation between great scenes and lame songs damages the show’s momentum. Mary Kay is, truly, a funny musical that would be better off without the music.

Letourneau, in case you’ve tried to forget, was an elementary-school teacher and mother of four when she had an affair with a sixth-grade student in 1996. After serving prison time, she and the student, then 21, married in a televised ceremony.

Gorilla Tango doesn’t just aim for easy targets—Letourneau and her young lover. The company scatters its fire with caricatures of teacher’s dopey frat-boy husband, slick congressman father and two local cops who make Mark Fuhrman look like Officer Krupke. Leslie Nesbit breathes new life into the senile grandmother stereotype, unblinkingly dropping punch lines on everything from dead cats to sexual acrobatics. The whole cast merits high marks for creating funny characters without hyperbolizing.

And then everyone starts singing, karaoke-style, changing the words to classic tunes. None of the songs after the opener (“Mary Kay,” to the tune of “Runaround Sue”) tell anything new about the story or advance the plot.The same directorial confusion is evident in the play’s improvlike staging—half the stage devoted to action, half full of the remaining cast, laughing and cheering on the actors. Even more confusing is why, in a play with countless quick changes, does an entire half of the stage go unused?

Despite its imperfections, this Gorilla Tango production is worth it for both the cast’s ambitious characters and the best mimed bathroom scene we’ve seen in a while. —Brian Golden