My overall impression
Each member of the audience seems to have one of two looks: jaw-dropping disbelief or red-faced attempt to catch enough oxygen between bouts of uncontrollable laughter. As a fan of the lounge singer in the film The Big Bus and, later, Bill Murray’s SNL bad lounge act, this was a natural for me, but neither of those had enough to sustain the yucks for an hour. However, M&O — along with an impossible supporting “cast” — is relentlessly hilarious: mini-medleys, a half dozen horrendous song snippets seamlessly interwoven into two-minute slices, interspersed with M&O character social observations, reveal not only consummate musical chops but complete and completely absurd characters. The costumes are surreal, beginning with merely horrifying loungewear and ending with outfits so perfect in their hideousness that you marvel at the neural connections which bridge Bosch and Dante with Nancy Sinatra nightmares. An absolutely astounding production. I haven’t laughed this hard or this long, in years. (I awarded five stars for cultural relevance, but that’s based on standards for mental hospitals with lockdown wards.)
