Topical “Newsical” creates polar atmosphere

Elizabeth Rose, left, and Genevieve Baer sing Red Hat Ladies, a nod to Menopause, the Musical, playing simultaneously with Newsical at the New Denver Civic Theatre.

By John Moore | The Denver Post

PUBLISHED: May 11, 2005 at 1:07 PM MDT | UPDATED: May 13, 2016 at 3:20 PM MDT

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With the opening of its sparkling new cabaret theater, the New Denver Civic has fashioned a bigger and slightly better version of the Denver Center’s Galleria Theatre.

For more than four years, the Galleria was home to the quick-change musical sketch comedy “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change,” and in many ways the Civic’s “Newsical the Musical” plays like its shrewd sequel, with the added elements of politics, pop culture and profanity.

“LPC” featured two men and two women singing and zinging on relationship foibles. “Newsical” follows the same formula (two of its cast members are even “LPC” alums), only it spoofs everything from current events (“Dubya Rides Again”) to celebrities (Michael Jackson, Martha Stewart) to “LPC”-style observations on love in these modern times. If you didn’t know better, you would swear the sweet online-dating sketch “America Is in Love Because America Is Online” was swiped directly from “LPC.”

What makes “Newsical” different is prolific writer Rick Crom’s commitment to freshening the show with new material, local and national, every few weeks. That’s a yeoman undertaking when you consider the Civic hopes to keep “Newsical” going in perpetuity. This is the first “Newsical” production outside New York, where it was nominated by the Drama Desk as 2004’s best revue, but Crom hopes to open similarly localized productions all over the country.

That approach may kill him, but it’s necessary for the show’s long-term survival. As funny as “Newsical” is, current events have a short shelf life as comedy. With “SNL,” Comedy Central” and “Mad TV,” satirizing the news has become a cottage industry, and the name of the game is rapid turnaround. Anyone who watches “SNL,” in fact, already will think Crom’s sketches on Botox and Dr. Phil are as moldy as references to Mary Kay Letourneau, Rush Limbaugh and SpongeBob SquarePants. There is even an appearance by Rose Kennedy, who has been dead 10 years.

But you have to hand it to Crom’s work ethic. In just the past week, he has added a hysterical sendup of the new German pope (“In order to get your confession, we have ways of making you talk!”), a witty take on baseball’s steroids scandal, and the funniest line of the night, which is all ours – “CU fraternities believe maintaining a 4.0 average should extend to blood-alcohol levels.”

But there is a danger when you blow into town from New York and start inserting headlines you don’t fully comprehend. Crom stumbles badly with a reference to a smoking ban in Colorado’s bars and restaurants – but that proposed legislation already was on life support by opening night and has since been killed by the state Senate.

Still, despite a sound-plagued opening night, the likable, talented local cast of Genevieve Baer, Drew Frady, Elizabeth Rose and Scott Foster makes “Newsical” great fun. Well, if you happen to be a Democrat.

The opener is called “Everybody’s Full of It,” but Crom hedges his bets. He really means “Every Republican is Full of It,” and in short order his polarizing, left-leaning politics become so blatant you wonder why he would so cavalierly dismiss 51 percent of his potential audience. “Lost in a Red State,” about a frightened New York family is funny, but like it or not, Denver is a tiny blue lifeboat in a big red sea.

The best sketches are timely without being overtly partisan: Baer as renowned musical director Susan Stroman spicing up Osama Bin Laden’s newest “Death to America” video with charm and choreography. Foster, a young Dick Van Dyke, singing about the plight of the straight white man. Rose lamenting the metrosexualization of her husband by the “Queer Eye” team. Frady doing just about anything.

A lovely number that seems completely incongruous is “Red Hat Ladies,” but it turns out it’s Crom’s homage to “Menopause the Musical,” the long-running hit playing in the Civic’s main-stage theater.

By far the biggest weakness of “Newsical” is its truly awful celebrity impersonations – Jackson, Stewart, George Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dr. Phil, Paris Hilton and Anna Nicole Smith, to name a few. These are talented comedians, and their vocal harmonies would make the Manhattan Transfer blush, but there isn’t a Phil Hartman among them.

But even at the play’s worst moments, Crom offers some comic gems. As the Kennedys mock their newest family member, one says of Schwarzenegger: “He sounds like Teddy after eight or nine drinks.”

Now that’s newsworthy.

Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.

“Newsical”
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