With a plot mutated from The Bad Seed and All About Eve, Ruthless! is a merry musical Frankenstein, dripping monstrousness like Lorelei Lee does diamonds — and subtlety like Beckett does sequins. Joal Paley and Marvin Laird’s singing, dancing spoof of glib sociopathology and showbiz ambition, which won the 1993 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Musical, is a lot of fun that goes on too long, leaving the stage with a body count tantamount to Hamlet’s. On the way it skewers, in addition to a handful of famous plays and films (from Gypsy to The Women), that favorite whipping boy, theater critics, while blaspheming at the altar of the thespian art and pretending to explore whether talent is a product of nature or nurture. In the end, little is memorable but that you had a good time and learned that recycling can be good for a laugh as well as for the environment. But the SpeakEasy Stage Company staging, a fizzy glass of sweetened vitriol, proves there’s nothing wrong with that.
What’s with SpeakEasy and the bloodthirsty tots this season? The troupe follows the third (and ongoing) incarnation of Bat Boy: The Musical with the cautionary tale of eight-year-old Patty McCormack clone Tina Denmark, as hug-happy and polite as the bad seed herself, and just as homicidal. When, due to blatant parental bribery, the talented Tina fails to win the lead role in the elementary-school play, that of the red-pigtailed title character of Pippi in Tahiti, she goes to what might be considered drastic lengths (lengths of a jump rope, to be exact) to remedy matters.
This to the horror of her sweet suburban mom, Judy, who by act two has discovered her own inner diva, triumphed on Broadway, and turned into Bette Davis delivering Eve’s bumpy ride. Thickening the genetically engineered plot are Lita Encore, Judy’s adoptive progenitor and a theater critic to whose breezy barbs even her granddaughter is not immune, and Sylvia St. Croix, an agent who becomes Tina’s and then Judy’s manager but who is not what she seems. In more ways than one, since she’s played by Will McGarrahan in tall, garishly stately, snarling yet nurturing drag.
The Ruthless! score has only two above-average songs, critic Lita’s revelation that " I Hate Musicals " (ironically lobbed into the middle of one and delivered by Margaret Ann Brady in the bouncy, near-masculine manner of American-musical sacred cow Ethel Merman), and " It Will Never Be that Way Again, " a farewell to the everyday that echoes Kurt Weill and is swathed in Edith Piaf-wrap by the talented Kathy St. George. As blissfully self-effacing mom Judy, who morphs into retro-chic and ruthless star Ginger Del Marco without shedding her innate adorableness, St. George is instrumental in connecting the show’s Bad Seed and All About Eve halves, which are otherwise about as of-a-piece as two people in a horse costume. And as ambitious daughter Tina, cherubic-looking Walnut Hill School for the Performing Arts ninth-grader Kristen Parker manages to combine the wistful pluck of Judy Garland with the harsh mania of Margaret Hamilton.
Oddly, few of the songs show off the performers’ voices, though all the cast have acceptable pipes or better. No matter, they get to show off in other ways, from flaunting Gail Astrid Buckley’s amusing costumes (including matching skintight velour Capri jumpsuits with little hats and long half-skirts for the Margo Channing and Eve Harrington counterparts) to shooting daggers the size of samurai swords. Musical director and onstage pianist Jeanne Munroe provides musical sheaths for those, in addition to tireless accompaniment and, where underlining is called for, some ivory-tickling melodrama of her own. Larry Coen’s decorously over-the-top staging aptly juggles eccentricity with cliché (and offers a couple of great sight gags).
Paley and Laird have evidently revamped Ruthless! since its decade-ago Off Broadway success, and Paley, his resumé says, is set to direct a London West End production of the new version in 2004. If more fine-tuning is in order, the team might get ruthless with its own notes and phonemes and trim half an hour. There’s such a thing as too much lurid-pink cotton candy.