Quality trash piles high in campy ‘Trailer Park Musical’
Now I know how I could be convinced to watch “The Jerry Springer Show” or “Maury” or other shows that feature topics such as “My baby daddy has a boyfriend!” (Actual topic, by the way.)
Such shows just need to add music because “The Great American Trailer Park Musical” is a trashy delight.
Onstage at Theater West End in Sanford, “The Great American Trailer Park Musical” zips through its sordid shenanigans with the energy of a squirrel trying to avoid becoming road kill when a drunken motorcycle gang races by on the way to a monster truck show.
Actually, I’m letting “Jerry Springer” off too easy — it would take more than music to make me watch, though “Trailer Park Musical” has a dandy collection of comic up-tempo country-rock songs, mixed with melodic ballads … and a random disco number that is worth it just to watch the cast dance. (David Nehls wrote the music and lyrics.)
The show also has a cast of characters that while intellectually challenged still are plenty likable (something the TV talk shows rarely achieve). It also has a pointedly funny story by Betsy Kelso. The plot is too ridiculous to spell out here, but suffice it to say it involves a stripper on the lam, an agoraphobic woman whose son was kidnapped as an infant, a dream of the Ice Capades, hysterical pregnancy, huffing permanent markers and a wife hoping to prevent her husband’s electrocution on death row. It’s guaranteed to make you feel better about your own life.
Did I mention that this takes place in Florida? Of course it does.
Director Derek Critzer has paced this lewd nonsense just right, keeping the laughs coming. The set, by Critzer, Preston Krenicki and Rollin Smith, sums up the tacky sadness of a faded mobile-home community. And the actors sell this silliness with everything they’ve got.
Names familiar to Orlando audiences populate the cast: Janine Klein, Sara Jones and Robb Ross — fantastic singers, all — among them. They are welcome sights. But others deserve recognition, too: Anna Olivia Banks has spot-on comic timing as a dumb blonde, Ashley Wilcox struts with style as Badass Betty. As the stripper, Molly Schoolmeester has impressive… pipes; and Joshua Oliveras takes his loosecannon character to comic extremes.