Amanda Centeno, La Daniella, León Ramos Tak, and Sushma Saha in Gooey’s Toxic Aquatic Adventure. Photo: Maria Baranova

When your puppet musical’s cast of characters includes a dead pigeon, a severed arm, a pile of toxic goo, and a whole lotta rats, it almost has to be about the Gowanus Canal. Clever, full of plucky “let’s put on a show, kids” energy, and performed by an ensemble of quadruple threats (in addition to the usual singing, dancing, and acting, they’re expert puppeteers) and a hard-working one-man band, the new musical Gooey’s Toxic Aquatic Adventure, playing at the Bushwick Starr, definitely has the aesthetic of “too much is never enough.” It’s an overflowing cornucopia of exuberant, colorful detail, from Cat Raynor’s bright set with its hand-drawn-style backdrop and proscenium decorations to Hahnji Jang’s costumes bedecked with flotsam and jetsam to Gaby Febland’s eclectic ensemble of puppets to Ben Langhorst’s cheery music and the quippy lyrics written by Langhorst and book writer/lead performer La Daniella. It also wears its hodgepodge of cultural influences on its sleeve: the marketing materials tip to The Wizard of Oz, Peewee’s Playhouse, and Frankenhooker; I’d throw in Avenue Q, Sid and Marty Krofft’s Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, Toxic Avenger, the Garbage Pail Kids, the Muppets—especially Oscar the Grouch—and Little Shop of Horrors)–and then the script piles on to that a list of “ingredients” that encompasses entire cinematic genres, including 70s exploitation, MGM musicals, and forty years of horror. 

Gooey throws a lot at its audience in rapid-fire fashion, and while it sprawls more than it needs to in some spots and races through others that could use a little time to breathe, it’s a rollicking good time. Daniella and Langhorst craft their book and lyrics with just enough of a satiric bite, and in the hands of director Sammy Zeisel, the design team, and a hard-working four-person ensemble that makes you believe the cast is at least twice as large as it is in reality, the production feels both DIY and lush. The adventure begins with a throwback journey to ungentrified Brooklyn—full of rats, raw sewage, and accents you could cut with a knife. (The accents are baked into the script–even into the stage directions–and Zeisel and the ensemble embrace the convention with gusto. It adds to the charming, retro, old-New-York quality.) Juanda, a pregnant Miss Gowanus beauty queen (La Daniella), drowns in her namesake canal while in labor. Thirtyish years later, Fred Boss (León Ramos Tak) has turned Gowanus into G’wond’rLand (and yes, I did have to see it written down to get the “go under” pun); where Juanda envisioned cleaning up the canal and revitalizing her neighborhood, Boss has instead dumped cement over the toxic sludge and built a corporate-shilling theme park. (Spoiler alert: not only will the barrier not hold, but the sludge it releases will become personified as one of Febland’s biggest puppets, voiced by Sushma Saha, bedecked with neon-green glowing eyes.)

Juanda’s daughter, Gooey (also La Daniella), miraculously survives her toxic/aquatic birth and grows up as a lonely, semi-aquatic resident of Newtown Creek with only an empty pizza box and a dead pigeon (both made into puppets) for friends. Smelly, trash-bedecked, funny-looking, and naive, Gooey makes a slightly unlikely intrepid adventurer, but good old-fashioned pluck and the heart of a dreamer will see her through, and Daniella’s affection for her creation shines through her performance. After hearing a radio announcement of a talent contest in G’wond’rLand, she sets off on her adventure, where she’ll learn to follow her nose to find her way; make and lose friends (most centrally, the puppet rat Scabby, voiced by Amanda Centeno as the quintessential crusty New York old-timer with a secret marshmallow heart); discover the meaning of family; shatter a few dreams and make some new ones. Guided by the voices on her semifunctional radio–a mix of news bulletins, jingles, and advertisements for in-world businesses like Boss Extermination and Zannoli’o’s chocolatey pizza rolls, Gooey makes her aquatic journey back to the borough of her birth–only to discover the contest has been canceled after a human arm escapes containment under the canal.

It’s classic hero’s journey stuff, with a Wizard-of-Oz-y “there’s no place like home” ending, a seasoning of urban blight, and a message of anticommercialism and anticorruption that doesn’t beat you over the head. The plotting does sometimes falter, with odd pacing and storytelling rhythms: Daniella and Langhorst race through the prologue, then linger in exposition and a meandering, repetitive start to Gooey’s quest in act 1, only to start building up new characters and barreling through plot developments in act 2. Two of the late-breaking characters, Scratch the Rat and Fred Boss–the one voiced and the other played by Tak–are both so well done that I’d wish to spend more time with both: Scratch done with remarkably expressive puppet work even compared to the high standard set by the rest of the ensemble, Boss with a full, loving embrace of the cliches of a thousand fictional mob bosses and a roguish charm.

While the shaggy tangle of cultural influences and nostalgic callbacks are a large part of the show’s charm, they also contribute to its bagginess. I might wish for the occasional choice that steers toward “less is more” rather than “too much is never enough,” to give some of the action and characters more room to develop. (For example—the satiric commercials that pepper the show are entertaining and thematically relevant to its anticommercialist message, but we could also probably get by fine with fewer repetitions and callbacks.)

But the elements that comprise the production never miss a beat. Langhorst’s music is simple but the lyrics he and Daniella have written are witty and bright. And while the characters are intentionally archetypal, the performances of both human and puppet characters are delightful: witty, arch, and cartoonish in the best sense. Maya Quetzali Gonzalez’s choreography makes much of the tiny space and small ensemble. Music director Jon Schneidman goes nonstop, as both a one-man band of an accompanist and a voice in the ensemble. It’s screwball, madcap, and while it skates a little close to cloying at times, it always skates away again. It may be odd to imagine that a musical kicked off by the not-quite-murder of a pregnant woman and featuring a roomful of scruffy rats, a dead pigeon, a severed arm, a mafia boss, at least one (well-choreographed) fistfight, and a poisoned canal could end being heartwarming, but it does.