OH MY . . . NUTS! A MUSICAL TRIBUTE TO THE LATE GREAT MARK NUTTER
Granted, Oh My . . . Nuts! is not as much a rerun as these other pieces. In the satirical hands of Mark Nutter (oops, sorry–the “late, great Mark Nutter,” as the ads and press releases refer to him), Oh My . . . Nuts! sends up all those musical-revue tributes to late, great songwriters–Cole, Ain’t Misbehavin’, and so on ad nauseam. It’s the “ad nauseam” that inspired Nutter to create a piece about his own works, with himself as deranged would-be genius–in between firing darts at the genre. In the meantime, the concept provides for a lot of audience favorites to be trotted out.
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Particularly noteworthy performances were turned in by Karol Kent and Peter Burns. Kent is a little ball of energy with a big, big voice. She also gets to sing two of the best songs of the evening: “Teenage Drunken Driver,” which ruthlessly imitates 50s pop, and “Mr. Evil,” written as the theme song for an unspecified James Bond film. In “Mr. Evil,” Kent’s efforts get a lot of support from the rest of the cast, who cavort around her imitating the scenes that usually roll behind the opening credits of any James Bond movie. Burns’s songs are not as memorable, although “It Happens” (a song from Joey’s World, a send-up of Sinatra and Pal Joey) is a pretty wicked parody. Burns has a manic, on-the-edge quality that fits beautifully with Nutter’s offbeat style of songwriting.
