"If you were a 17-year-old girl obsessed with rockabilly and pinup queens and your best friend wants to be Elvis, where would you go?"
Like his previous outing, the orgiastic drama "Bitch Macbeth," Frank Cwiklik's frenzied new comedy "Sugarbaby" displays the talented writer/director's desire to inject into theatre the same surrealistic, fractured imagery and energy you see in music video and independent film -- which he does, but not quite as successfully this time out.
When small-town teenage girl Bailey Sugarman (Marguerite French) -- nicknamed "Sugarbaby" -- decides to run away from home, she talks her best friend, an Elvis wannabe named Jesus (Adam Swiderski), into coming along. The two head straight for Vegas while, almost immediately, word spreads first through their community and then the nation that she was kidnapped by "Moo-slam terrorists."
Adding fuel to the fire, headline-grabbing conservative TV commentator Rod Butane (Josh Mertz) and liberal documentary filmmaker Mitch Common (Kevin Myers) quickly grab onto the story as a way of furthering their own agendas. In addition, lawman Sheriff Rufus J. Miranda (Brandon Kalbaugh) grows determined to bring the two kids back, and in doing so sets them all on a mad trek across the country -- from Sin City to Florida and then north to the nation's capital.
The cast works overtime to create a hurricane-like comic atmosphere, aided mightily by Cwiklik's deft use of sound, music and quick scene changes. In particular, Mertz and Kalbaugh quickly steal much of the show with their broad, funny characterizations.
However, like a theatrical version of that grossly overdone genre of folks-on-the-run-who-become-media-stars (but, thankfully this time, sans the blood-soaked murder sprees), "Sugarbaby" attempts to satirize America's gluttony for media hype. But because it's been done so many times in recent years (see "Natural Born Killers," "Bulworth," et al.), it's hard to find a fresh angle on the still-relevant idea. Though he does score many points here, Cwiklik just doesn't find a sharp enough edge to the cut through.
Moreover, though French and Swiderski do a fine job, their relationship just isn't strong or charismatic enough to work as the center of the play's frenetic universe.