Take one part The Bad Seed. Fold in one part Torch Song and stir until stiff peaks form. Spread on one layer All About Eve, and bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. Garnish with a dab of 42nd Street, and you’ll have Ruthless! The Musical.
Joel Paley and Marvin Laird’s tribute to child stars and Broadway divas—which back in the day gave big breaks for young performers like Britney Spears and Natalie Portman—is being mounted in an entertainingly breezy production by Citadel Theatre in Lake Forest. It features terrific turns from, among others, Bob Bullen giving off great Roz Russell energy as talent agent Sylvia St. Clair and Catharina Araujo as her charge, devil-child prodigy Tina Denmark (Araujo alternates her part with Olivia Mulder), who quickly learns the hard lesson that “life is a bitch and it starts in third grade.”
Act One of Ruthless! indeed borrows numerous story beats from The Bad Seed, as Tina’s aspirations are foiled by both her flaky mother, uber-housewife Judy Denmark (Annie Beubien), and lesbian schoolmarm Miss Thorn (Samantha Mayer), who’s directing the third grade production of Pippi in Tahiti. Miss Thorn gives the lead role to the better-connected and much-less talented Louise Lerman (Melody Rowland), who meets her nasty end at the end of a jump rope.
Araujo can belt out the Ruthless! score with the best of her adult co-stars. She also does a tremendous slow burn, projecting every bit of Tina’s rage as she quietly listens to clueless adults negotiate her future. She’s missed when she’s absent for a bit and her character is shipped off to the Daisy Clover School for Psychopathic Ingenues. As Act One draws to its conclusion, a great many Big Reveals hinging on both coincidence and matrilineage shift the narrative wildly, with Judy coming more closely into focus. Beubien is appropriately fabulous in the Act One finale “Angel Mom.”
Act Two of Ruthless! isn’t quite as on-point as Act One. The show becomes more of an unstructured pastiche, where we’re spotting show business cliches—a personal assistant named Eve, also played by Rowland, for example—in addition to following the fates of the characters we invested in in Act One.
Nevertheless, the performers and the direction by Christina Ramirez capture the perfect tone and energy for moving the story briskly, always projecting the knowing irony needed for the perfect sendup. The show indeed hits its perfect meta-stride when Judy’s mother, acid-penned critic Lita Encore (Jenny Rudnick), performs her solo number “I Hate Musicals.” Settings and costumes were also beautifully rendered by Bob Knuth and Taylor Pfenning respectively; Musical Director Aaron Zimmerman was outstanding with his keyboard accompaniment to the performance as well.
It might be a bit of a hike for Chicagoans to get this far up the North Shore, but Tina Denmark is a bad seed that sprouting great fun.
Ruthless! The Musical runs through May 17 at Citadel Theatre, 300 S. Waukegan Rd., Lake Forest. For ticket information, click here or phone 847-735-8554.