Review: Bigfoot! Gives Musical Theater a Brand-New Outcast and Lots of Punchlines

Populism. Scapegoating. Feral creatures learning the rules of polite society. They’ve all been slam dunks for musical theater since Beauty and the Beast cracked the genre in the early ‘90s. It’s unfortunate for Bigfoot!, a satirical addition to the canon now running at New York City Center Stage I, that the main stage next door, just a few months ago, resurrected Bat Boy, the cult musical that set the standard for sendups of the outcast story. With silhouettes so similar, you can’t help but compare the fine details—and as creature camp goes, one of these things is much sharper than the other.

To be fair, Bigfoot!’s aspirations are humble. With a cast of six doing double and triple duty with the help of stick-on facial hair (wigs, hair, and makeup by J. Jared Janas and Cassie Williams) and 2D trees rolling on and off to convey varying degrees of forest (sets by Tim Mackabee), the targeted tone is sketch comedy (the show even has Saturday Night Live alum Alex Moffat on hand to go whole hog as its cartoon villain Mayor). But when the sight gags and punch lines start to buckle under the weight of a full-length musical, you remember why sketch is usually delivered in five-minute doses.

Amber Ruffin, who revamped the recent revival of The Wiz and earned a Tony nomination for co-writing the book for Broadway’s Some Like It Hot, leads the Bigfoot! creative team as co-book writer (with Kevin Sciretta), co-composer (with David Schmoll), and lyricist. The story is broad, simple, and set in the silliest of decades—the ‘80s.

Bigfoot (Grey Henson), a sweet boy hankering for banal conversation, is hidden away in the wooded outskirts of rundown small-town Muddirt where his mother Francine Foot (Crystal Lucas-Perry; apparently, it was always a surname) keeps him safe from the narrow-minded townsfolk. However, staying off the grid, and even making incognito repairs in town, doesn’t stop Muddirt’s rapacious mayor (Moffat) from rallying his citizenry to kill the Sasquatch as a distraction from his shady dealings with a water park mogul (Jade Jones, a mustachioed vocal gymnast).

Winning over these pitchfork-wielding villagers is pretty easy work for our charming Bigfoot, who starts by befriending the biggest fish of all—Joanne (Katerina McCrimmon), a ruthless hunter and legacy conspiracy theorist. With that taken care of, all the conflict that’s left derives from Francine’s repeated fainting spells and her building sexual tension with the family doctor (Jason Tam).

Ruffin’s fingerprints are all over the musical’s barrage of punchy one-liners, but much like the mayor’s ploy, it’s not enough to distract from the overall flimsiness. Everything in the writing, and in Danny Mefford’s direction, is geared toward quick laughs, which only magnifies the unattended details: sloppy lyrics with lazy rhymes, music that ignores the aural gifts of the Reagan era, and unpunctuated beats of slapstick.

It puts the onus for entertainment on our six performers, all of whom succeed by deploying their personal bags of tricks. Even trapped in a Chewbacca Halloween costume, Henson is unflaggingly loveable, with a silver voice and perfect comedic timing. A veteran Buddy the Elf, there’s no question why he’s cornered the market on cuddly giants. He and McCrimmon (who finds moments to show off her big voice) even tease a fun buddy comedy that doesn’t maximize its potential. Meanwhile, Lucas-Perry, a performer who can commit to any bit and sing the roof off any theater, makes the most of Francine alongside Tam who earns plenty of giggles as the earnest and oversexed Doctor.

Do any of these antics add dimension to the show’s ham-fisted commentary on capitalist greed and proletarian rage? No. But let’s not forget this is a musical called Bigfoot! Silliness is what we were promised, and silliness is what we get.