“Smurf The Musical”

That’s the LVA office nickname for jukebox tuner Surf The Musical, currently in rehearsal at Planet Hollywood. As many as 35 Beach Boys songs have been laid end-to-end to create a midget version of a Broadway musical. The show’s creators have skipped the full-scale, B’way phase and leapt straight to a 90-minute, intermissionless “tab” show, per discredited Vegas custom. Although Smurf, er, Surf is still being fine-tuned, its production team literally begged for publicity at last night’s media preview, so I figure they deserve what’s coming …

Basically, Surf has two kinds of problems: the remediable and the intrinsic. For instance, it’s not too late to recast the male lead, whose weak and tremulous voice can’t carry a number, although the other two members of the romantic triangle are excellent, to say the least. Also, director Kristin Hanggi (Rock of Ages) committed a telling Freudian slip when she introduced “the members of our set,” instead of the intended ‘members of our cast.’ Because Beowulf Boritt‘s set is the star of the show: several walls of video cubes that display super-colorful projected scenery, devised by Darrel Maloney. The producers are so enamored of — or so determined to monetize — their new toy that it’s used in hyperactive, distracting fashion. The set literally moves more than does the cast. But that’s fixable, too, as is (or should be) the aggressive amplification, which is so lacking in directionality that it can take a while to figure out which of the 20-odd, overmiked and interchangeable cast members is actually talking. And you, Big-Afro Guy: cover up those man boobs, dude. Perky nipples aren’t a good look.

Given the injudicious amount of bragging that prefaced the mini-performance (four numbers), the actuality of Surf was even remotely approach the preceding hype: Likening one’s Clearasil musical to Mad Men is akin to inviting a withering, Don Draper dressing-down. Gregory Gale‘s costumes, we were informed, cost as much as $1,200 apiece. If that’s the case, the producers should ask for a refund. Honestly, I’ve seen better couture in community theater. The songs may be of the Beach Boys but script-assembler Jason Setterlund‘s plot and camp aesthetic are pure Beach Blanket Bingo, the sort of comedy in which Mom’s confiscation of your Dippity-Do represents a severe loss of social status. If you think of the Beach Boys catalog as bubble-gum music then you won’t mind. If you hold a higher opinion of it, you may have a problem with Surf. Choreographer RJ Durell comes to Surf by way of Katy Perry‘s California Girls tour, which is a telling indicator of the demographic thrust of the show … although I have difficulty applying the verb “thrust” to what’s currently a flaccid and underachieving enterprise, one that I’d almost forgotten by the next morning.

Postscript: I wonder if rubbed any of my fellow fiftysomethings in attendance the wrong way to hear the director and choreographer condescendingly say they were going to a “modernized, exciting” version of the Sixties — which they spoke of as though it were an ancient and obscure era. (To their post-MTV sensibilities, it probably is.) Speaking as someone who experienced the Sixties firsthand, they were plenty modern and exciting, thank you very much.