Bombs Away!

TWEEDING MAN Brian Rabinowitz plays professor.

For its first production since pulling up stakes at its longtime Belmont location, Bailiwick has reunited with the authors of one of its most successful recent outings, the screwball musical Dr. Sex. This time, Deering and Bortniker have put together a revue of parody songs purportedly cut from classic musicals such as The Sound of Music (from which we get a cheerful number about nuns gutting Nazis), Mamma Mia! (an Abba-style ode to IKEA), Les Misérables (“We’re French and We’re Revolting”) and so on. The show’s MC, a Broadway musicologist, tells us he’s gone to great lengths to acquire these rare gems and now is determined to share them with us—the lawsuit-happy estates of Rodgers & Hammerstein be damned.

So basically what we have here is a Forbidden Broadway knockoff with some half-hearted stabs at narrative thrown in for good measure. Fair enough. Bortniker’s pastiche score and crotch-obsessed lyrics aren’t always as funny as you’d expect from a Forbidden spoof (Hair’s “The Age of Aquarius” becomes “The Age of Uranus,” har har). Still, the show has its moments: Riffs on South Pacific and Miss Saigon make hilarious use of racial stereotypes, while a bris scene inserted into Fiddler on the Roof maintains an impressive rate of dick jokes per minute.

The best thing about Zak’s production, though, is a cast that sells each joke, no matter how corny or crude, as if it’s comedy gold. Of the five performers, Garassino—equal parts vulgar and adorable—comes closest to walking away with the whole thing.

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