THEATER REVIEW:'Musical' really is a scrumptious delight

Just like a triple chocolate sundae with whipped cream, bananas, extra cherries, and a crisscross of hot fudge on top, "The Musical of Musicals: The Musical!" is a very tasty show — not filling, but fabulously frothy.

If there's a single theater in the Valley where the chefs always serve up scrumptious gourmet musicals, it's the Colony Theatre.

"The Musical of Musicals" is a deliciously funny parody on five different musical-comedy styles by way of five different one-act plays — Rodgers and Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, Jerry Herman, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Kander and Ebb.

As with any successful parody, the writers — in this case, Eric Rockwell and Joanne Bogart — do it well because they truly love the shows they are roasting.

All of these players have worked together on this same show before, when it was down at the Laguna Playhouse in Laguna Beach. Were there ever any minor glitches before "The Musical of Musicals" transferred here? If so, they are gone now.

In the hands of four lesser performers, those sugary punch lines might send you into a diabetic coma just before intermission. But in the hands of the superbly neurotic Alli Mauzey, the goofily jaded Mary Gordon Murray, Brent Schindele's cutie-pie hunkiness and the incredibly zany malevolence of Jeffrey Rockwell, it's one wild party.

Throw in the fact that Jeffrey Rockwell not only sings, acts and dances as well as anyone else on stage, nonstop, for 90 minutes, but as musical director, he plays all the piano accompaniment for himself and everyone else. Whew!

Special raves also go to director/choreographer Pamela Hunt, whose fabulous site gags expertly send-up every conventional dance step you've ever seen in the past 50 years.

Even with no musical theater background whatsoever, anyone can enjoy the pure looniness of "The Musical of Musicals" on its own terms. Die-hard musical-theater fans will be rolling in the aisles.