Hot Star, Nebraska comes across as composer/playwright Paul Grellong’s homage to the indie-pop music he loves. Everybody acts as if he or she had just stepped out of a Sloan, Weezer, or Lemonheads song: the girls are quirky, cute, and gifted; the guys are quirky, cute, and sensitive; the grown-ups are quirky, cute, and confused. And the play is quirky and cute, though it makes a far better case for the 23-year-old Grellong as a songwriter than as a dramatist.
Billed as a world premiere and promoted as a " high-octane rock musical, " this isn’t strictly either. The show, then called The Nebraska Project, premiered last year at Brown University; it’s since been trimmed by an hour. And Grellong’s music of choice isn’t high-octane rock but the kind of melodic pop that makes virtues out of warmth and naïveté.
Even the plot could have come out of a pop song. Sisters Melissa and Margo have planned different escape routes from their stifling home town. Bookworm Margo (played by Katie Pickett with a nice mix of sass and sensitivity) aches to go to Dartmouth; Melissa (who says her hero is Courtney Love but here performs more like a young Barbra Streisand) has entered a " beauty show-slash-religious revival " whose prize is a ticket to the big city. Although this is supposed to be a conservative town, Melissa lives with both her family and her boyfriend Tom, a sweet, hunky type with two glaring problems: he’s doing dirty work for the local mafia, and he thinks Journey’s Steve Perry is a genius. The characters’ dreams will fall apart before the second act is over; so will any trace of coherence in the story.
A solid album’s worth of songs gets played along the way, though they’d probably be better served by a good rock band than by the Off Broadway belting of the principals. (The duets by Ben Steinfeld and Miriam Silverman, as Tom and Melanie, are a bit too reminiscent of Brad and Janet in The Rocky Horror Picture Show). Still, Boston is full of bands who’d love tunes as catchy as the Jonathan Richman–esque ballad " Tall, " the romantic duet " Keys to Your Heart, " and the Hole take-off " Phylicia Rashad. " This last, with its chorus of " Phylicia Rashad, I wish you were my mom, " makes a good joke if you remember The Cosby Show. If you don’t, the reference gets explained a good half-hour later.
The early scenes are full of sparkly dialogue and surreal twists — including a singing telegram that comes dancing out of a cabinet — but those become a cover-up for the lack of a proper storyline. References to back history are dropped but never explained: why the sisters’ father is in jail and why the family are collecting money from Pepsi-Cola are apparently part of the play’s missing hour. Margo has installed five computerized locks on the cupboard where she stashes money for her Dartmouth dream, but we never learn why she doesn’t just apply for financial aid (or how, toward the end, Melissa manages to break into the cupboard).
Things get shakier in the second act, after Melissa loses her virtue to a sleazy talent-show advance man (Greg DeCandia, apparently modeling the character after Weird Al Yankovic). After Melissa has her big revelation, the play dissolves into a flashback, with major characters left unaccounted for. When we last see Tom, it’s not certain whether he’s dead or has just talked his way out of big trouble. Stuck into the second act is a song by mother Joan (Julie Jirousek) that reveals both her own torments and her deepest feelings about her daughters. But since her character had previously been a white-trashy cartoon who chugged a Southern Comfort bottle and made passes at mailmen, her big moment comes out of nowhere.
And for all that most of the music is good enough to distract you from the play’s heavy-handed social commentary, those targets are just too broad. This vision of the Midwest — a land of religious fundamentalists, high-school assemblies, and sexually frustrated teachers — is exactly what you’d expect from a wise-ass from the Northeast. (If the Manhattan-bred Grellong wants to know what kind of darkness really lurks in Nebraska, he might try seeking out some old Bruce Springsteen.) Hot Star — not a real address, by the way — is more like the catchy pop version of the Midwest. It’s a nice place to visit, but nobody actually lives there.
