“The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse” at The New Group at The Pershing Square Signature Center (Photo: Monique Carboni)
The story goes that Stephen Sondheim was inspired to write Sunday in the Park with George by a comment from his collaborator James Lapine. Looking at Georges Seurat’s populated canvas, Lapine remarked that the main character was missing: the artist. Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley do something similar with The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse, their original pop musical at The New Group. This time, the art is a 2006 New York Post photo of Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, and Paris Hilton shot through a windshield with text boldly proclaiming them the “3 bimbos of the APOCALYPSE.” And the missing main character?
Breslin and Foley imagine a fourth, unseen, bimbo in the backseat of the car. Coco, identifiable only by a bracelet beaded with her name, becomes the project for a trio of internet sleuths. We know where Lindsay, Britney, and Paris are. But what happened to Coco? That mystery is solved in a breezy ninety minutes of ridiculous, hilarious Millennial antics.
The trio of Gen Z streamers looking into Coco’s disappearance pick up the digital breadcrumbs she left behind, particularly a selfie Coco took with two women in the background, and speculate who they could be and where the picture could have been taken. The search for Coco is a red herring, though. What Breslin and Foley are really investigating isn’t “dead white girls,” as a character says, but the culture of the internet and how it’s changed from Coco’s heyday to the present.
The Worms, as the younger people are called, were all born after the Post photo and look at the Y2K era almost anthropologically. Using this generational divide, Breslin and Foley wring an outrageous amount of humor from Millennial culture, eliciting identification with the absurdity of those years. If you were a teenager in the early 2000s, you’ll more than get it. The musical is part “you had to be there” and part “why were we like this?”
Breslin and Foley draw a direct line from the way the paparazzi treated the women in the tabloid photo through the advent and popularity of social media to its all-consuming hold on the younger generation. Brainworm wears big sunglasses when streaming and hasn’t left her room in years because of deep insecurity. The vitriol directed at the three “bimbos” has only become more prominent, the musical implies, driving young women underground. But in searching for, and finding Coco, Brainworm also finds herself.
The writing is sharp throughout and some of the songs have such recognizable early-2000s pop energy that they could have been ripped from Napster. The physical production struggles to live up to the ambition of the writing, though. For a musical that takes place predominantly within the internet, Stephanie Osin Cohen’s scenic design is flat and empty, giving no sense of the immersion the characters feel in their online world. Amith Chandrashaker’s lighting, as a result, has little to illuminate. The set’s arches have lights that toggle on and off as The Worms travel around the web, but it all feels very lo-fi for such a high-tech musical.
The cast is also uneven. The three older women, Keri René Fuller as Coco, Sara Gettelfinger as her mother, and, especially Natalie Walker as Coco’s sister are excellent, revelling in the raucous silliness of their roles and singing their faces off. Walker’s turn as Coco’s stylist performing the song “I Literally Die” is a highlight of the show and feels like a musical theatre moment that should go down in history.
But the younger trio all feel a little too tepid and aren’t helped by director Rory Pelsue’s staging. Within the blankness of the stage, Pelsue keeps them mostly in a line center stage and even when doing Jack Ferver’s choreography, there’s not much going on. For a musical so exciting in its writing and half of its performances, it’s visually dull and lags when we’re away from Coco and crew.
On the whole, though, The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse is a smart, funny piece of work and has a lot to say about how internet culture has evolved, but how it’s sort of always been the same. People have always talked shit about other people. People have always wanted to be famous by any means necessary. People have always wanted to stand center stage and belt. Hell yeah, I say. More musicals like this, please.