Five cheerleaders rush out onto the stage, doing a suggestive dance with thrusts, kicks and shimmies to high-powered music. They strike a final pose and stand there, basking in the cheers of the unseen multitude at the stadium and panting… a lot…for a little too long, until the crowd at the theater starts laughing and clapping.
The show is Debbie Does Dallas: The Musical, based on the pornographic film from 1978. It’s about Debbie Benton, who wants to be a Dallas Cowgirl cheerleader and gets accepted onto the squad after trying out, but can’t afford to get there. So she asks her cheerleading buddies to help her, and they all start selling favors to earn the money in time. While the play offers suggestive jokes, it’s not pornographic and stays safely within a raunchy “R” rating.
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The Nonprophet Theater Company’s staging is like a gentle elbow in the rib with an accompanying wink. It’s supposed to be campy. When the actors act like, well, porn stars, and say their lines like they’re reading from cue cards, that’s kind of the point. It’s all underscored in the play itself, which doesn’t try to give the characters any real depth. The cheerleaders are mostly characterized by their sexual predilections.
For the most part, though, it works. Some of the running gags get a little tiresome, but when the plot revolves around high-school girls turning tricks, a staging can’t take itself too seriously.
The show isn’t without it’s shortcomings though—starting with the fact that it probably shouldn’t be a musical. The songs just slow down the narrative, and it was hard to hear Debbie (Macia Noorman) over the prerecorded music. What I did hear gave me the impression that Noorman wasn’t a particularly good singer. Most of the songs came off as just being noisy, which is probably in part due to the music not being played live. The dance number from Mr. Hardwick (Tom Lehmann) about naughty uses for a candle was an exception, but most of the numbers were imminently forgettable.
The minimal set design was put to clever use throughout the show, setting up some of the funniest gags of the night. Donna (Elizabeth Graveman), a cheerleader who discovers her knack at domination during the play (and looks surprisingly like Mageina Tov, who played shy neighbor Ursula in Spider-Man 2), turns in a solid performance with good comedic timing and enough chomps to make her character slightly more than the average bubble-headed cheerleader.
Lisa (Rachel Hanks) stole the show. Not only was she pitch perfect as the school bimbo who steals Debbie’s boyfriend, but she’s also the best singer in the cast. The male actors each had to juggle several parts. Reginald Pierre makes a good turn as repressed librarian Mr. Biddle, and the polite but randy sports-store owner who gives Debbie her, um, fundraising idea. Chris Ayala is also good as the brain-dead, self-centered Rick, who dumps Debbie for her friend Lisa, and as Hamilton, a rich cad.
On the whole, the show is decent. There’s a strange part where Debbie steps out of character and begins to explain the message of the play. Whether this was the scriptwriter’s attempt to add some moral component to the show or another joke that fell flat isn’t entirely clear—it was awkward and unnecessary. But the rest of the musical doesn’t get bogged down in moral dilemmas or even dimensional characters. And in the end, that turns out to be a good thing.
