GREETINGS FROM PLANET GIRL
nytheatre.com review by Paul Hagen
August 15, 2003
"You’ll be singing this later," Dorothy Dwyer promises the audience
during Greetings from Planet Girl’s fabulous Freudian finale (a
Calypso sing-along that sends up everything from Moulin Rouge to
dear old Sigmund’s thoughts on the female genitalia.) She’s right. I’m
still humming the song, even as I write this.But let’s rewind: when you land on Planet Girl, you’re greeted by a truly heinous attempt to parody Star Trek. This sketch is a good example of the weaker points of the evening—they’re parodies of parodies—too far removed from the object of ridicule for the jokes to land on target. Fortunately, they beam out of Trek territory post-haste and the other flat bits are surrounded by mountains of chuckles, giggles and even the occasional guffaw.
The rest of your time spent on Planet Girl is divided into two camps of comedy. In this corner, we have hyper-post-feminist comedy: blatant discussions of vaginal difficulties (you’ll never look at Glade air freshener quite the same again!) and abandonment of shame—like The Vagina Monologues with teeth (and, oh, that last comment will be so much funnier once you see the show). In the other corner, the Planet Girl girls have a great deal in common with the boys of Monty Python: high-brow, intellectual humor mixed with low-brow, crowd-pleasing shtick. Add a touch of surrealism and a generous dollop of music, and you’ve got good-time sketch comedy like the heart-wrenching saga of the Dish and the Spoon, a criminal game of bingo, video-dating with Susan B. Anthony, and my new favorite song—with its irresistible chorus of "Nobody wants to blow George W!"
Margaret Ann Brady, Jan Davidson, Dorothhy Dwyer, Lucy Holstedt and Julie Perkins are the funny and fabulous citizens of Planet Girl (also its creators: as the program puts it, "All material writ by them what performs it"). As for my visit there, any planet which I leave with two ribald songs about genitalia (technically one about genitalia and one about fellatio) stuck in my head is definitely worth the splashdown.
