“Psycho Beach Party” has the perfect set up for a campy farce. It has the perfect setting, ’50s-era Malibu, and the perfect target, “Gidget” and other beach movies of the period. With everything seeming so ripe for parody, why does it fail to come through?
The marketing campaign makes it seem as if the show would be a campy horror play, where characters trade crude innuendos while slowly being picked off one-by-one. Instead, the script fails to deliver and reads more like you crossed “Gidget” with “Girl, Interrupted.” The plot is not driven by murder, but rather by the shaving of random females’ naughty parts and heads.
Chicklet (a wonderful Tommy Callan) is a surf-enthusiast half-pint that makes up for her inadequacy by channeling split personalities. The most dominant of these is Ann Bowman, a Stewie Griffin-like “Dominatrix Empress of the Planet Earth.” Instead of going on a murderous spree or crossing into ’50s B-movie cinema by raising a sea monster army, Bowman sexually taunts surf legend Kanaka (Nick Aliff) and shaves two women.
The acting and production is very good, but the script was nothing the actors could deliver on. As written, the characters aren’t comical enough for much humor. Berdine (Laura Murden) is a geek obsessed with Jean-Paul Sartre and Soren Kierkegaard. Provoloney (Dallas Tolentino) and Yo-Yo (Richard Gregory) play two men afraid to come out of the – um – beach shack. Starcat (Matt Mitchell), a reference to “Gidget” ‘s Moondoggie, is the beach bum wrestling with going to college. Sympathetic might be too strong a word, but the play seems to portray them more like actual characters than it should.
Production-wise, the set looked authentic, like the audience was peering onto an actual beach of late-’50s Malibu. With a huge sandpit in the center of the thrust stage and two enormous palm trees shooting out from behind the set, the set could not have had a better design.
The costuming was very authentic as well, down to the female actresses’ retro triangle-shaped bikini tops. The hair and make-up was perfect as well, with all the men sporting pompadours or duck’s tails.
A few minor glitches occurred on the technical side. During a scene change, one of the massive palm trees was bumped into, which sent it rocking. A lighting cue was taken too early while a member of the stage crew was still visible. Underneath the beach shack, another crew member was visible for half the show, which was distracting.
The script has some ’50s-related bad jokes, like Starcat punning off the title of The Ventures hit “Walk, Don’t Run,” but it largely misses the mark.
Instead of going over the top with innuendos and lewd humor, the play relies on repeatedly doing the same gag over and over. The only point where the play goes out of its way to be offensive is when Chicklet channels “Tilene” a black Safeway checkout lady, but this just ends up being offensive rather than humorous. It gets everything wrong that John Water’s original film “Hairspray” got right. Some last minute speechifying from Yo-Yo about gay rights seems like some weird Hail Mary pass to save this play.
The show is a really odd choice for the main stage, and one can only wonder what those who chose this script were thinking.