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  • A Touch Too Much

The Hollywood Theatre was a shrine to one of the worst movies ever on Saturday night. Showgirls fans and unwitting theatergoers about to be really uncomfortable clogged the lobby, and over at the merch table, "Versayce" T-shirts were on sale, Nomi prayer candles were the first items to sell out, and yeah, I wanted one.

Halfway through the show, about half of people in the row ahead of me left. I heard a few comments to the effect of, "Let's get out of here while we can!" Fair enough—there were plenty of compelling reasons to bail: technical difficulties with the performers' mics made them occasionally impossible to hear, some of the actors seemed out of their ranges vocally, and at one point, the projection behind the stage accidentally displayed someone's desktop icons and a hovering cursor. It all seemed very slapdash.

Yes, these are bad things to have happen in any live theater production. Yes, all in all, I would call Showgirls the Musical an unqualified mess. But I don't think this means that it was a failure. Showgirls the movie is so unbelievably bad that any respectable adaptation of it should also be kind of awful. After all, you have to hit the levels of high-camp mimicry that made the Lifetime original biopic about Anna Nicole Smith so bad it was perfect (that movie marked perhaps the only time Lifetime's low production values, over-the-top dialogue, and caricature-bad casting have seemed smart and possibly even intentional). As with Anna Nicole Smith, so with Showgirls. You have to be true to your source material, and in the case of Showgirls, that material is a huge, unmitigated mess.

So yes, this one-night-only production was a mess. But it was right to be. If that sounds like the most back-handed compliment ever, well, it probably is. Still, I liked Showgirls the movie (I mean, try not to marvel at its badness; really try) and I enjoyed Showgirls the Musical. So did many of the audience members who stayed through the whole production, the Showgirls faithful in their stilettos and drag makeup, toting bags of chips and beers. The two middle-aged ladies sitting next to me whispered excitedly throughout the show, and at the end, I overheard someone say that it "showed promise."

And I agree. The musical had some funny visual gags (including extra-fake-looking cheeseburgers and a Bayside Lions T-shirt), and some standout moments, as when Josh Edward as Zack Carey did a very convincing Nelly during the infamous pool scene—his rendition of "Hot in Herre" replaced what Courtney Ferguson described as the moment "when Nomi turns into a frenzied, naked shark" in her preview of the musical. Was it good? No. But what else are you gonna do on a Saturday night? Watch TV and eat chips?