The Beastly Bombing

I really wonder if there's a target audience beyond me for The Beastly Bombing. Well, sure, I'm sure they didn't have most 20-year-old females in mind when they were writing this terrorist operetta, but I'm an odd case - my parents and I flew all the way to Buxton, England when I was nine to attend the Gilbert & Sullivan festival, where I performed in the ensemble of the Mikado and saw a different show every night. And on top of that, I'm incredibly politically incorrect, and love myself a good terrorist joke. So last fall when I saw that this was being produced in LA, where my parents live, I sent them an email begging them to go watch and report. They didn't of course. Imagine my delight when it shows up as part of NYMF!

The show opens with two white supremacists and two members of Al Qaeda attempting to bomb the Brooklyn bridge - they fail, but yet another terrorist group succeeds and various misadventures eventually find them in jail with the president's two druggie daughters. Love (by way of E) eventually curbs their evil ways (and since there are four males and two females, guess what!), but not before they find themselves at the White House, epicenter of ZOG - the Zionist Occupation Government.


The score feels very much like an authentic operetta, and most of the actors do an admirable job handling it. Especially apt is Jesse Merlin as President Dodgeson, handling the patter (I suppose he plays the John Reed role?) with remarkable ease. Whether the songs themselves work is hit and miss - they all sound appropriate to the format, but the girls' songs about their drug addiction don't have quite the same level of hilarity of "The Union of Forgotten Terrorists." The best song, though, has to be "The Sorrows of the Sensitive White Supremacist," a song immediately preceeded by my favorite line in any NYMF show so far: "I sick of being treated like crap because I'm a loser!" You can listen to the song at the Beastly Bombing's show page, though I doubt it will be quite the same as watching Aaron Matijasic prance around the stage while singing it.

And speaking of prancing, I feel I should mention the choreography by Kevin Remington. Always appropriate to the score but still finding ways to make the audience laugh out loud, it's really masterfully done, providing context to the songs while elevating the humor.

As I said, this show may have trouble finding an audience. Just like any theater crowd, a majority of the patrons were... let's say elderly, and I saw more than a few with their hands folded politely in their late during curtain call while the people surrounding hooted and hollered. And I'll admit, some parts crossed the line of decency even for little old me. So who knows? I mostly enjoyed it. Who knows if you will.
(Haha, sorry. Worst ending to a review ever, I know.)