Debbie Does Dallas – The Musical

Debbie Does Dallas – The Musical

She was the best of girls. She was the worst of girls.

Debbie was an all-American teen in an all-American town engaged in the all-American activity of cheerleading, and her big dream was all-American, too: to lead cheers professionally for none other than the Super Bowl-champion Cowboys, "America's Team." But getting to Big D demanded the kind of cold, hard cash that couldn't be earned quickly stocking shelves in a storefront on Main Street, so Debbie decided to make the money the old-fashioned way – as in the oldest profession, wink, wink. Before long, she has the entire squad signed on with her agency, Teen Services, and they have all the all-American menfolk in their all-American town eating right out of their ... well, hands, naturally.

In taking Debbie Does Dallas from stag flick to stage frolic, adapter Erica Schmidt has soft-pedaled the hardcore in favor of a little satire on Yankee capitalism and a whole lotta camp. In place of the original's scenes of carnal activity, she's substituted musical routines that merely suggest the erotic interplay taking place and in a manner owing more to Benny Hill than Behind the Green Door, i.e., teasing and bawdy. However, she hangs on to much of the movie's actual dialogue, which is so stupefyingly dumb that it can be played for laughs. With the whole enterprise bouncing along to the disco thump of Seventies style – all feathered hair and Puka shell necklaces, flared bell-bottoms and giant Afros – the show mocks Me-Decade excesses coming and going, going and coming. Its tale of good girls gone bad is supposed to be so bad it's good.

And much of it in Naughty Austin's production is. With bleached-blond wings cascading down either side of her flawless, apple-cheeked face, Sara Kendrick's Debbie wrestles with the morality of doing a bad thing for a good cause in a breathy squeak that's a hoot. Meanwhile, Marta McGonagle's jaw-droppingly perky Tammy keeps talking about her dream of being in the Senate while gliding on roller skates and shaking her twin ponytails. Blythe Day's Donna and Abbey Windham's scheming Lisa don't appear to have three brain cells between the two of them. And Amy Steiger's Roberta, delivering her lines in a slow, husky voice that suggests Marlene Dietrich on Thorazine, is so incredibly dense that you couldn't call her dumb as a box of rocks without insulting the rocks. Director Blake Yelavich delivers numerous comic touches that show him to be the right man to stage this show: the cheerleaders' opening walk toward the audience ... in slo-mo; his football field set, complete with yard lines, goal post, and scoreboard; the backlighting during assorted erotic encounters.

But the show overall is wildly inconsistent. The pace is ragged, clipping along in spots, then lagging inexplicably. Some actors don't seem to get – or at least to be able to give us – the over-the-top Seventies sensibility. Rolling set-pieces that smartly suggest various locales are brought on and taken off in lengthy, awkward changes of scene. Now, the evening I attended, the gremlins appeared to be out in force, causing more technical snafus – lights fading out, sound glitches, microphone feedback, falling set-pieces – than I've seen in a single performance in years. Such problems can be created deliberately for laughs, feeding the "so bad it's good" frenzy; that's what Naughty Austin's previous hit, Noises Off, is all about. But these came across as genuine flubs, which unfortunately undercut the fun being created the rest of the time.

In the show, Debbie doesn't actually do Dallas. Rather, it's all about what – and who – she does to get there. Sara Kendrick and her crew make it a treat to watch those efforts here, but the Naughty Austin production doesn't quite get us all the way there either.