A title like A Commercial Jingle for Regina Comet is a lot to live up to. It’s big—yet the three-hander at the DR2 Theatre is only 80 minutes long.
With its gleaming gold mylar curtain greeting theatergoers as they take their seats, it promises a certain amount of pizazz. But like its main character—the fantastically named Regina Comet (played by Bryonha Marie Parham with a megawatt smile and voice to match)—the musical has a bit of an identity crisis.
Is it a showbiz satire, sending up a 40-trying-to-be-20 pop star as she wrestles for social-media relevance? Or is it a piece about two nondescript struggling songwriters (played by the show’s actual librettists, lyricists, and composers, Ben Fankhauser and Alex Wyse) trying to churn out a hit like their hero, Barry Manilow?
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
Truthfully, one wishes it were more tongue-in-cheek; that’s where Fankhauser’s and Wyse’s writing is the strongest. Regina—described as “the woman who took Hanson’s virginity in one fell swoop”—is 40 and desperate to rebrand, reboot, and refresh her image with a laser-fueled concert tour, teenage-focused marketing campaign, and a fragrance called—wait for it—Relevance. In her first number, “Again”—reminiscent of Spamalot’s “A Diva’s Lament” (if there’s ever a revival, Parham would be an amazing Lady of the Lake)—bemoaning her lack of popularity, she sings: “I used to be on top/ Sold out at every stop/ But now my show’s on Groupon.” So she decides to build her comeback around a catchy, hook-filled new song. (Wouldn’t it have been easier to go on Dancing With the Stars?) Regina wants someone on the level—or better than—Smokey Robinson or Carole King. A big name. She ends up with two literal no-names: Man 2 (Ben Fankhauser) and Other Man (Alex Wyse), a pair of baby-faced pals in their early 30s who probably still get carded buying boxed wine at Trader Joe’s.
And let’s just say the songs don’t exactly flow. The guys spend a lot of time flipping through notebooks and reminiscing about their glory days at Camp Rosenblatt, where they wrote such groundbreaking shows such as Sukkot, Mama, Sukkot. “All those Jewish-leaning children taking breaks from their non-competitive sports just to enjoy our poignant, yet haunting (!) Shabbat musicals,” recalls Man 2 wistfully.
The best song—that is, the melody most likely to worm its way into your ear and stick around for a few days until you sing “It’s a Small World” to get rid of it—is actually called “One Hit Song,” which is probably why it’s so frequently reprised. Fankhauser and Wyse are genuinely funny. (If only this stage direction could have been spoken in the show: “Regina appears suddenly and without warning, like an Oscar nomination for Florence Pugh.”) Pretty much anything that comes out of Regina’s mouth is gold, and her songs—such as “The Girl Beneath the Lasers,” which Parham performs brilliantly straight-faced—are wonderfully ridiculous.
But the aging-star story is much more successful than the writers-quibbling-over-a-rhyme narrative. And when Man 2 falls stupidly in love with Regina—leading to the most disgusting, not to mention environmentally unfriendly, magic trick you’ve ever seen at a restaurant—the fighting between the writers grows very tired very quickly. We don’t want to see Man 2 and Other Man sniping at each other. We want to see Regina. And her lasers!
A Commercial Jingle for Regina Comet opened Sept. 27, 2021, and runs through Nov. 21 at the DR2 Theatre. Tickets and information: reginacomet.com
