A sweet little gem of an impromptu premise brought creator (and writer and composer and lyricist) Dan Goggin’s Nunsense into being, fully formed. Folded into nearly every moment of the franchise-spawning musical is the suggestion that the nuns onstage are not professional entertainers, but were rather compelled by disastrous circumstances to throw together a spur-of-the-moment revue. Essentially, forgivable is written into the show’s DNA, excusing gaffes in less-experienced companies and keeping the supposedly unrehearsed content feeling fresh. Even so, keeping the seasoned performer in sight behind the amateur character is critical, which is made unfortunately evident by its absence in the current production at the Encore Musical Theatre Company.
The play’s framework is predicated on a macabre event: the deadly poisoning of the majority of the Little Sisters of Hoboken, and the dearth of money to bury the last four, who are waiting patiently in the convent freezer. Frequently mined for effective gallows humor, the regrettable, half-reverent situation is somehow even more ridiculous than it sounds. In desperation, a handful of the surviving sisters decide to throw a talent show–like fundraiser to hasten the final internments, which is how the audience winds up looking at the Mount Saint Helen's School auditorium stage dressed up for a high-school production of Grease: the play isn’t merely about the event, it is the event. The craftsmanship of the design is exceedingly well-masked; set designer Leo Babcock outfits his dud of a backdrop with secretly interactive mobile components, whereas Daniel Walker’s lighting scheme starts with impersonal fluorescence and sidles into more theatrical effects. Costumer Sharon Larkey Urick dives into the layering humor of women whose thematic accessories must work around their cumbersome habits, supplementing Goggin’s ample word play with visual jokes that mesh well with the predominating low-budget enthusiasm.
Yet in the same spirit of the inexperienced, director Barbara F. Cullen executes an overcorrection that vaults her cast past amateurish and into the realm of completely, sometimes painfully green. The five talents on display are all Encore veterans, but the viewer would be forgiven for never guessing so, given the debilitating extent to which each insistently eschews focus. In the midst of childish songs (guided by music director and conductor George P. Cullinan), multimedia interludes, and a bumbled case of only-one-spotlight-itis, what this show needs to unify it is a prevailing sense of control and collaboration by the team onstage — it’s on offer, but Cullen rejects it, resulting in messy scenes and between-number transitions in recurrent disarray.
This deficit is made especially apparent by select moments in which the individual performers inherently shine. For the presiding Mother Superior (Barbara Scanlon), it’s a delightful comic turn in which the effective disciplinarian unwittingly expands her horizons. As second-in-command Sister Mary Hubert, Amy Smidebush brings revival intensity to her edifice-razing pipes in a wildly fun second-act number. Although Mary Rumman makes the addle-pated Sister Mary Amnesia endearingly loopy, the performance is adrift without support, particularly in one difficult multitasking solo number. Cullen’s style-spanning choreography finds an able home in Madison Deadman as novice Sister Mary Leo, who turns her naively strange fantasy of becoming a ballerina for Jesus into something tangible and sweet. Of the lights hidden under bushels, however, the greatest contrast is Sue Booth’s wisecracking Sister Robert Anne: ever the downtrodden understudy in the presence of the others, Booth explodes with star quality when alone, rendering especially tiresome what a cloying barnacle her character embodies for the majority of the play.
The joy of Nunsense is its off-the-cuff whimsy and spontaneous charm, but its success comes in finding a balance between justifiable looseness and skilled execution. Although this production goes a little too deep undercover in its pursuit of the former, the show remains a peppy confection, stuffed with pun-filled cleverness and peppered with enticing glimpses of the capable artists beneath the veils.