Disaster! A 70’s Disaster Movie… Musical!
By Seth Rudestsky and Jack Plotnick
Additional Material by Drew Geraci
Directed by Neale Whitmore
Music Directed by Joey O'Reilly
Produced by Theatre Frisco
Audience Rating: PG,highly stylized depictions of violence, mild language
Run Time: 2 hours 15 min, including one 20 min intermission
Accessible Seating: Available
Hearing Devices: Not Available
Sensory Friendly Performance: Not Available
ASL Performance: Not Available
Production Sound Level: Comfortable Volume
Noises or Visuals to Prepare For: None of Note
Reviewed by Jenny Wood
Theatre Frisco’s production of Disaster! A 70’s Disaster Movie… Musical! is just a lot of fun. The premise is decidedly unserious - over the course of a single evening, patrons of a high-end casino riverboat docked outside Manhattan fall victim to an unhinged sequence of disasters, like, every Grey’s Anatomy Season Finale crammed into two hours. A true jukebox musical, the disasters are stitched together by a score featuring over 30 pop classics from the 70s.
Presented in the Frisco Discovery Center’s Black Box Theatre, Director Neal Whitmore’s staging is intimate and immersive. Audience is seated on three of the four walls, and Musical Director Joey O’Reilly leads a seven piece band seated on a platform along the fourth to establish a thrust performance area.
The cast delivers on Whitmore’s promise of silliness and logic defying fun – constraints of the space limit how literally one can depict any particular disaster, but cleanly executed physical comedy gets the point across.
Dialogue is briskly delivered with seasoned comedic timing, moving quickly across plot points and songs. The arrangement does a clever job of threading lyrics of upcoming songs into the dialogue, cheekily tipping the audience off to what is coming next.
Andrea Fernandez Tom is endearing as Jackie, the almost fiance of Mikey Abrams’ smarmy casino owner Tony. Ken O’Reilly’s mousey Disaster Scientist Ted is Tony’s perfect nemesis. Krystal Rodriguez and Thomas Schnaible delight as Marianne and Chad, a young couple seeing each other for the first time since she left him at the altar. Kristal Reed’s antics as the bubbly Shirley trying to hide symptoms of her terminal illness from her recently retired husband Maury (Josh Hepola) gave us my favorite subplots.
The best thing about this show is how shallow and comfortable the waters really are, despite sharks and barracudas and faultlines: perfect for those of us in the mood to sit back and enjoy some solid campy belting punctuated by the occasional well timed saxophone solo.
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