They Came from Way Out There

[April 25th, 2007] Sometimes you just need to escape. That's the operating principle behind ART's Close Encounters-themed musical revue, They Came From Way Out There. Each of the surprisingly tuneful members of the paranoid Paranormal Society—from Frank Sullivan (Bruce Blanchard), the affable and accident-prone president and founder of the Society, to Dr. Benjamin Fleets (Kevin-Michael Moore), the twitchy ex-USAF scientist who now hears extraterrestrial voices spouting platitudes—are striving to escape their mundane lives and grow beyond their selves through alien abduction, out-of-body journeys, astral visions and so on. Life's kicked them around, and they want out.

But as long as they're still here, they want to rule over the other marginalized nutcases, so they throw their hats in the ring and run for president in an evening of electoral show tunes. The outcome is pure camp—a poorly thought-out series of loosely related songs about UFOs, past lives and other assorted pop-culture weirdness that, though well executed, is entirely artless.

Not that the show isn't plenty of fun. The songs are amusing, the choreography is excellent in its silliness, and the props and costumes are fantastic—think talking armchairs and dancing monoliths. The ensemble looks to be having a blast: Moore comes across, as usual, as a barely restrained sociopath, and Susannah Mars, despite her less-than-exciting role as a Sunday-school instructor who sees little green men, blows her colleagues out of the water with her usual musical fireworks.

The production isn't without a sinister undercurrent—maybe I'm crazy, but when I hear a bunch of ET fanatics singing, "You get to go to heaven but you don't gotta die," I think Heaven's Gate. They Came elects not to explore the darker side of America's obsession with the otherworldly, leaving promising material like Uri Geller and the Church of Scientology untouched. That's probably for the best—delving into cynical fakery and manipulation would be a downer, especially in a show filled with men-in-black disco jams and love songs to Bigfoot. This is honest, no-strings-attached escapism, an easygoing funfest that aspires to take the audience, as hapless hacker Zeph (Adam Goldthwaite) sings in the show's most effective number, to "dreamland." And, hey, after the last couple weeks, we could all stand to get away for a while.