THEATER REVIEW
“King of Pops: A Post-Apocalyptic Musical”
Grade: B -
8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays. Through May 30. $12.50-$29.50. (Pay what you can performance at 8 p.m. May 4.) Dad's Garage Theatre. 7 Stages, 1105 Euclid Ave. N.E., Atlanta. 404-523-3141, extension 201. dadsgarage.com.
Bottom line: Cooler than a Popsicle.
A sweetly earnest guy in need of a little direction gets fired from his job at an insurance monolith and decides to follow his passion: selling frozen pops.
When he sets up shop at the corner of North and North Highland avenues in Atlanta, his business is so successful that it becomes the envy of an evil entrepreneur. Soon a deadly war ensues, and the King of Pops must prove his mettle against a vanilla villainess and her band of ice-cream cone clones.
Welcome to "King of Pops: A Post-Apocalyptic Musical," a wacky, LSD-flavored treat from Dad's Garage Theatre loosely based on the real-life story of Steven Carse, who started Atlanta's beloved King of Pops with his brother Nick in 2010.
In the lunatic tradition of Dad’s, the musical by Mike Schatz is a winning concoction of silly, sophomoric shtick and genuinely clever storytelling. Sure, it looks a little rough on the edges — it’s the ant-covered pop some kid dropped on the playground — but give it a chance, and it will tickle your taste buds with its inspired and inventive tomfoolery.
Schatz — who contributes the book and lyrics and shares music-writing credit with Ben Holst, Jason Shannon and James Watson — knows a thing or two about the conventions of musical theater.
You know the formula: Boy (Chris Rittelmeyer) gets King of Pops cart — along with a kooky klatch of fellow vendors including pint-size Smaghetti Sally (Karen Cassady), oatmeal maker Baby Bear (Mark Kendall) and dead-head philosopher-poet Johnny, who may or may not be who he says he is (Schatz). Boy loses cart, thanks to the perfidy of world-dominatrix wannabe Gia (Gina Rickicki) and her cone-cart sidekick, Heidi (J. Hill). Boy gets cart back, but not before amassing casualties in a battle royale with the Ice Queen of Cones and her army of zombie sharpshooters.
Schatz may be inspired by comic-book and sci-fi superheroes. But he knows his musical-theater archetypes. And he doesn’t miss a chance to spoof, borrow and steal from the best and the worst, from “Urinetown” to “Les Miserables.”
As staged by director Tom Rittenhouse, the performances range from terrific to so-so. I wouldn’t say that any of these players are especially fine singers or dancers. But that’s never the point at the slapdash, improv-based Dad’s Garage.
Kendall’s Baby Bear is a hysterical riff on the proverbial angry black dude. Cassady may be diminutive of frame, but she’s a marvelously expressive eye-roller and, at times, heart-breaking. Rittelmeyer is nicely likable and somewhat teddy bearish as the laid-back Steven Carse.
But the heart and soul of this show is Schatz. He’s the closest thing to charismatic this musical’s got, and you can hear it when he sings his big Johnny Cash-style solo, “When the King Returns.”
I enjoyed “King of Pops: A Post-Apocalyptic Musical.” I’d just like to see it told with enough financial resources to exploit its true potential. Sometimes it feels as if video designer Adam Pinney is just getting started, while Alexa Ann Cathcart’s costumes and Melisa A. DuBois’ props are low-budget facsimiles of good ideas gone sloppy.
On its face, the Carse brothers’ tale is a noteworthy entrepreneurial adventure. But it is hardly the stuff of epic. Yet Schatz clearly has an affinity with the material, and he runs with it. In every sense, the hallucinogenic plot crashes and burns. Just like a frozen treat, it’s gone in a second. But in its loopy, illogical, self-satirizing, follow-your-bliss kind of way, the musical is brilliant. I suspect audiences will lick it up.
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