Stay Inside and Hide From Laguna Playhouse's Dreadful Girls Night

A few feather pink boas are scattered in the audience, plus a couple of flashing tiaras. Groups of women are celebrating birthdays. Everyone seems ready for a good time.

It’s called Girls Night: The Musical, for Pete’s sake. Doesn’t that sound like a good time?

Problem is that Girls Night, running at the , is barely that.

The practically nonexistent plot is a big part of the problem: Four women go out for karaoke to celebrate the engagement of their long-dead friend’s daughter.

That’s pretty much it. But the larger issue is that this show can’t decide what it wants to be and tries too hard to be too many things. Comedy? Musical? Drama? In the end, it fails at all three.

Start with the “comedy” part. A few lines: “You got hit with the ugly stick too many times.” And when referring to, er, the hair down there, “It helps the curtains match the drapes.”

Not original, and not funny. Cruder gags don't work either—a blow-up man doll, vibrators, penis references, classy-like-a-truck-driver dialogue. It's a feeble attempt to create Sex and the City-ish banter, minus the witty writing, minus the fashion, minus the relatable characters.

Speaking of characters, we have the dead friend Sharon (played by Wilma Cespedes-Rivera), a hovering “angel” watching the action, narrating to the audience what happens. Problem is every time she takes the spotlight, it's like someone has pressed the “pause” button—you just want to hit “play” again. Sharon doesn’t get any funny lines; instead, she has to say such things as “Liza’s been married three times, blah, blah, blah.”

Then there are Kate and Anita. Of the four women, two are uptight super-frumps with essentially the same homely outfits. Why would you have half the women on stage be twin nerd characters? Supposedly, Anita takes antidepressants, but that doesn’t get played out enough for the audience to understand what she’s about.

Carol, played by Tina Jenson, is the wild party-girl sister of Kate, whose boob-squeezing (her own), vagina-spraying antics start out humorous, but then get tired. And there's Liza, the stereotypically vapid, marry-rich kind of gal with three kids she seems to show zero interest in.

These unhappy women don’t seem like they would really be friends, do they?

As for the “musical” part, all of the women can sing amazingly well and possess true acting talent. But the songs come out of nowhere. Unlike in most musicals, the songs don’t advance the plot or comment on the story. They're more like song commercials—something fun and entertaining to distract you.

The show’s pacing is totally confusing. After Liza and Carol have a serious talk in the bathroom (attempt at drama), the lights dim and Kate bursts on stage to sink a drunken rendition of “The Love of My Man.”

Talk about non sequiturs.

So with all this starting-stopping to wait for Sharon’s explanations, to wait for the out-of-place songs, the story ... just doesn’t happen. No conflict established, no climax of action, no conflict resolution. A little twist that is hastily thrown sort of explains things, but it's too little too late. We never meet the engaged girl they were waiting for; she simply doesn’t show up. They wrap up the evening with another song and go home.

Throughout the show, audience members (98 percent women) did get up and move, and some howling laughter was heard. Several clapped and moved during the song-and-dance numbers. I can’t help but wonder, though, if they would have been served the same if the show had just been billed as a revue or variety show of women singing popular karaoke songs. Or if they would’ve been served better by going out for their own night of karaoke. Or if maybe I needed to down a few shots before going into it.

Sonya Carter, who plays Liza and helped adapt the production for the American audience, recently claimed in an Orange County Register article that the show is about “girl power.” Why is it that when there is an all-female production, it’s unfortunately filled with vacuous roles? That’s girl power?

I know it can be done. I remember 20-plus years ago, seeing a female-headlining musical, Angry Housewives, where four unhappy housewives form a punk band. Hilarious from start to to finish, the show ends with the band belting out a song titled, “Eat Your F**king Cornflakes.” Now that’s funny and ahead of its time (long before Desperate or Real housewives), a.k.a., “girl power.”

No, instead, Girls Night is the chick-lit of musicals—lipstick pink and glittery on the cover but on the inside just silliness.

Girls Night: The Musical at the Laguna Playhouse, 606 Laguna Canyon Rd., 949-497-2787. Dates, times and ticket prices vary. Through June 5.