What I liked
So far, so good. Rather wittily, the product being sold within the show is a cream which promises to slow down aging. The slogan “You won’t only look beautiful, you will BE beautiful” is well and cool. The parallels with Wilde’s classic novel work nicely.
What I didn't like
What doesn’t work is that the Dorian character, Lori Green (which is clever) has no real arc into depravity other than getting high, breaking into an office, then breaking up with her boyfriend. Compare this to treating someone so brutally they commit suicide. The leap of one year later to reveal Lori willing to commit murder on a whim, then demanding she face the consequences—this arc is not a journey but a huge leap over plot holes that qualify as chasms.
The problem here frankly seems this is a full length play idea squeezed into less than an hour. Lacking much context, the musings and emotional journeys of the central characters seem to come out of left field. Methinks there’s something really powerful and worthwhile in here somewhere, but in its current written form all the effort to bring it out is on the cast—and frankly they seemed to lack enough (or very well-used) time to develop that. Most obviously, I don’t think most of them usually knew exactly what they were really saying or why. But again, they lacked any context to find that.
My overall impression
A riff on Oscar Wilde’s The Painting of Dorian Gray (it even says as much in the press release) Beautiful Monsterz updates the setting to the modern world of models and advertising.
