Theatre in Review: The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse (The New Group)Our playwrights have fallen, collectively, into a retrospective mood lately, examining past historical moments marked by a hope that somehow evaporated. In Purpose, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins wonders about the long aftermath of the Civil Rights movement, while in Liberation, Bess Wohl recreates the women's encounter group that shaped her mother's life (and, by extension, her own). Other, perhaps younger, writers have taken to sorting through the detritus of obsolete pop culture. Five Models in Ruins, 1981, obsesses over the idea of a Vogue photo shoot featuring Diana Spencer's rejected wedding dresses. (Talk about evaporated hope...) Indeed, everyone seems to be looking for the moment, big or little, when it all went wrong, leading to the confused, borderline catastrophic moment in which we dwell. That's certainly the case with Brainworm, Bookworm, and Earworm, the three doomscrolling adolescents at the heart of The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse. Located thousands of miles apart, living at the intersection of puberty and agoraphobia, each is a bedroom prisoner, addicted to their screens, using the flood of incoming information to make sense of a world that, they fear, is falling apart in real time. As Bookworm notes, "The first time I heard you talk about Juicy Couture tracksuits, I felt like I finally understood the cultural context of 9/11." Earworm replies, "And I never understood why Britney Spears shaved her head until you taught me about Operation Iraqi Freedom." With a world view like that, you might be afraid to go downstairs, too. Bookworm and Earworm connect with Brainworm, aka She/Her/Sherlock, who uses her Internet prowess to hunt down missing girls. Initially, Bookworm and Earworm are in it for the clicks Brainworm brings to their online feeds, but soon all three become fixated on the title photograph, a snap of Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, and Paris Hilton seen in The New York Post in 2006. (The story's deck: "No clues, no cares, no underwear. Meet the party posse of the year.") Taken before the Worms were born, the photo holds a talismanic quality for them. But wait: What's the hand lurking between Spears and Hilton? Could there be a fourth, unidentified figure? Well, maybe she is Coco, whose shot at Lindsay-Britney-Paris-level stardom flopped when the song she uploaded on a then-nascent YouTube was greeted with an avalanche of online scorn. According to "disgraced blogger Perez Hilton," Coco spun out of control and is probably dead. But Brainworm -- a real Veronica Mars when she gets going -- scrutinizes the scant evidence, theorizing that there is more to the story. As it happens, she is right on the money. The first half of The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse is a fresh and entirely original take on a generation that, having grown up post 9/11 and weathered the 2008 fiscal crash, the pandemic, and the Trump Administration, is maturing into an army of basket cases, nervously eyeing the landscape for the next disaster. So overwhelmed are they by the sheer flow of data that they struggle to parse the difference between, say, climate change and a demi-celebrity's public freakout. (Or, as Bookworm puts it, "Have you ever wondered how this one photo from twenty years ago created the digital dystopia we live in today?") Furthermore, the casual cruelty of Internet trolls has left them thoroughly traumatized. "A single comment from an anonymous user can really ruin your life when you're a 12-year-old girl," Brainworm notes. Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley, collectively responsible for the book, music, and lyrics, go where few playwrights have dared to tread. If The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse has a predecessor, it is Joe Iconis' Be More Chill, which shares a concern with all things digital. (Together, they arguably form the basis for a new kind of YA musical.) In some ways, their show is like Eighth Grade, Bo Burnham's harrowing film about life in the tween jungle, if it were set to a kicky, up-tempo indie pop score. Coco's YouTube aria, "Something Out of Nothing," is a devastatingly on-target account of the hunt for notoriety at any price. ("Gonna shoot a massive blank/Bang bang!/Gonna rob an empty bank/Am I a manifesto or a prank?") Equally arresting is "Crying in Wal-Mart, where Coco frets that her "super-whore discount Mom" will marry her off, leaving her "a bimbo bride in a bargain bin." It's also fun to watch the three Worms scroll through differing scenarios: Was Coco a glamorous enigma or a trailer park denizen? Was she knifed to death by a jealous stylist? Was she a closeted lesbian with a too-controlling mother? And if Coco is dead, who dropped off her bracelet on Brainworm's doorstep? The show falters in its second half as the truth gradually comes out. At first, it appears that Coco is the victim of a situation too ugly for this musical to support. But this bleak revelation is superseded by a wild twist showing how far someone will go to secure lasting fame (here defined as a gig on the defunct MTV series Total Request Live). Because Breslin and Foley are dealing in attitudes rather than characters, these events, clever as they are, never seem to matter. (They certainly don't make any sense.) It doesn't help that the so-so sound design by Megumi Katayama and Ben Truppin-Brown leaves one sometimes straining to hear the lyrics. (To be sure, this is rock music, always a challenge in the theatre, and the cast's diction is less than ideal. But the lyrics are too good to miss.) Then again, as a catalog of new faces, The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse may be one of those crucible-of-fame projects whose participants quickly become much better known. As Brainworm, the pint-sized Milly Shapiro invests these shaggy proceedings with an all-important gravitas. As her partners in sleuthing, secretly in love but unable to say the magic words, Patrick Nathan Falk and Luke Islam are so charming that one misses them when they drop out for a longish stretch. As Coco, Keri Rene Fuller, a former Jane Seymour in Six, owns the stage as if by royal decree. Theatre fans will recognize Natalie Walker, a Drama Desk nominee for The Big Gay Jamboree, as the mysterious "hoodie girl" who follows in Coco's wake. Theatre fans may not recognize the Broadway performer Sara Gettelfinger, terrifyingly transformed as Coco's mother, who is either deranged, calculating, or both. Amusingly, this musical about the perils of life in the digital age has a notably analog production design. Stephanie Osin Cohen's scenic concept involves a series of oval portals with occasional drops depicting palm trees, the Total Request Live logo, and a drawing of the infamous bimbos photo. Cole McCarty's costumes take the word "quirky" to new heights, but the ensembles for the Worms feel right, and his evocations of Coco's idea of showbiz couture are often hilarious; Matthew Armentrout's hair and wig designs play a major role here. Amith Chandrashaker's lighting includes the canny use of chases, ballyhoos, and shadow looks. The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse isn't a total success, and it's probably too much to say that, despite many striking effects, the director Rory Pelsue (who also developed the project) has total control of this skittish material. But it has a style all its own, and the band, directed by Dan Schlosberg, really cooks all night long. If you care about new ideas in musical theatre, it deserves your attention; among the current spate of reflective, retrospective works, it looks backward and forward at the same time. --David Barbour 
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