Musicals are known for being flamboyant and over the top. For every “Les Miserables,” there are three “Shrek the Musicals,” and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The genre, involving singing, dancing and more, lends itself to a certain amount of melodrama. And Blackburn College’s production of “Ruthless!” succeeds entirely because the cast was so very willing to commit themselves to that melodrama.
“Ruthless!” follows the ordinary, talentless and scarily polite mother Judy Denmark (played by Carolyn Conover but originally cast as Jessica Cramer), and her frighteningly perky but ultra-talented daughter, Tina Denmark (Alia Stewart). When a woman named Sylvia St. Croix (Brandon Pease) enters their lives, claiming to be an acting coach that can make Tina a star, their lives are turned upside down. It’s a parody of every too-sweet/too-creepy middle-class mother and daughter any of us have ever seen on any sitcom, and to work it needs all the melodrama it can get. With enough 3rd-grader-on-3rd grader murder, mistaken identities and forgotten pasts to fill any soap opera, the show is kept from being anything but funny by the ridiculously over-the-top performances of the actors. When Tina cheerfully murders another 8-year-old girl by hanging her so that Tina may usurp her role in the school play, what ought to be morbid and horrific is instead made hilarious. The script is well-written, but without a cast willing to go 110% in on the over-the-top parody of the kinds of characters they represent, it wouldn’t work. Luckily for us, the cast did universally great at it.
Special mention goes to Stewart, whose performance as 8-year-old murderess Tina is hilariously cheerful, completely lacking in empathy, and still cute as a button. Conover is equally as compelling and funny as both a strangely plasticine housewife and, later, as a diva enthralled with the stage and her own ego. The alcoholic druggy of a third grade teacher is the star of every scene she’s in, whether she’s downing drink or calling children “douchebags.” And Sylvia St. Croix could have easily become nothing more than a stereotype, funny only because of the age old “women in dresses” trope, but Lewis keeps her fresh, upbeat and funny for far more compelling reasons.
The show had a bumpy road to production: the lead, originally cast as Cramer, had to be taken over by director Conover when Cramer was put on vocal rest for months. And the show wasn’t entirely without flaws. The second act was slower, shorter, and less compelling than the first. There were moments when dialogue was lost or song lyrics were muddy or difficult to decipher. But even through all that, the audience, and this reviewer, never once stopped laughing.