Lysistrata Jones

Let's be honest: if there's one notable thing about the musical Lysistrata Jones, it's Liz Mikel's right breast. In a metal bra covered in a half toga, her enormous cleavage spends the entire show upstaging the rest of the cast and threatening to bust out of its constraints. There were definitely moments when I was waiting for the bra to bust. I just kept thinking, "The center cannot hold." Her breasts also are the focus of the best sight gag of the entire show.

But what's it really saying when you spend roughly 90% of a show thinking about a supporting actor's boobs, even when she's not on stage? Nothing good, I'm afraid.

Lysistrata Jones awkwardly attempts to update the Greek classic to a modern college campus where instead of Trojan women withholding sex to end a war, cheerleaders hold it back in order to convince their boyfriends to win a basketball game. It's a concept I found very cute...until the show started. And it almost immediately became clear that the musical was going to sink under its own efforts at cuteness and curiously dated comedy. Every joke lands like it's 1997, especially the curiously dated dialect. One wouldn't be surprised if a Spice Girls joke suddenly popped up.

The cast does well with what they have, but they're not working with a ton. The Transport Group again decides to do an "environmental" staging. For Hello Again, that meant sitting around tables that the cast cavorted on. Here, we get to sit on folding chairs in a basement gym and the cast performs on a basketball court. What does this add to the show? Absolutely nothing. But the chairs are super-uncomfortable, and the score is amplified to maximum distortion for all 100 or so people in the small playing space.

Listen, I wasn't going to like this show no matter what. Cute moments are sabotaged by an awkward book that tries too hard to be funny and not nearly hard enough to make any actual sense. But what could have been harmless was drained of any joy by a terribky conceived production .

I loved Hello Again and felt like the unusual staging added quite a bit to the experience, even if it made for some awkward angles and strange sound issues. This was less awkward but all the more disappointing because it added literally nothing. The show just felt...cheap. Win some, lose some. This is infinitely skippable.