Review: Ginger Twinsies Is a Parent Trap Spoof That Can't Stop Scrolling

There was once a deliriously funny off-Broadway parody of a beloved film from the late ‘90s, stuffed to the brim with queer comedy and topped with abundant pop culture references. But, alas, Titanique closed earlier this summer, and there just isn’t room on the door for the chaotic Ginger Twinsies, as much an imitative homage to that now-shuttered show’s success as it is a send-up of Nancy Meyers’ remake of The Parent Trap.

If you’ve never seen the 1998 The Parent Trap, what are you waiting for? It’s a clever, heartwarming update of the tale of long-separated twins Annie and Hallie (both played by Lindsay Lohan in her carefully staged split-screen debut) finding each other at summer camp and switching places to force their divorced parents back together. Within their enemies-to-twinsies narrative, an early sequence of pranks that the girls play on each other with mounting outlandishness lives rent-free in the minds of the millennials this play targets.

In parodying Titanic, there was ample fodder for Titanique to make fun of: the film’s massive scale and running time, its melodrama and self-seriousness, and, most effectively, the Céline Dion theme song. But The Parent Trap is already a comedy, and a mighty self-aware one at that. As a result, there’s very little to swipe at here for writer-director Kevin Zak, other than the occasional amusing footnote to the film’s minor absurdities (how did those bunkbeds get on the cabin roof?) or gentle critique of the film’s Y2K-era queer-coded characterizations. In casting two actors (Russell Daniels, also of Titanique, and Aneesa Folds) as the twins instead of one performer doing double duty, Zak misses the chance to riff creatively and theatrically on the film’s most notable feature: the stitching together of Lohan’s dual roles, which required motion control photography and body doubles.

In Ginger Twinsies, the joke is that Annie and Hallie look nothing alike. ”Does that mean when our parents split they decided they’d each take one of us and then they were like, ‘I’ll take this one, you keep the Black one?,’” Hallie asks when the twins reunite. But Zak doesn’t build much on that promisingly metatheatrical premise.

Ultimately, there’s no pointed through-line that illustrates why this film is any riper for spoofing or infusing with rampant, unnuanced sex jokes (the dad’s main personality trait is now that he loves “shoving things up his hole”) than the other neighboring movies (The Devil Wears Prada, The Princess Diaries, Love Actually) from which Zak quotes at random.

Instead, he mainly uses the screenplay as a canvas for free-associative cultural references. Some of them are clever connections: He reimagines the harrowing summer camp ear-piercing scene as if the nail is the slow-motion bullet from Hamilton. But more often, the arbitrary references come fast and furious. “Strawberries?” offers the camp director. “Heard of them? They’re that sexy red fruit from the gay episode of The Last of Us.” Later, that same character is “nearly killed by Miranda getting finger-blasted by Che Diaz.”

As a result, watching Ginger Twinsies is the equivalent of scrolling very quickly through your For You page on TikTok—or rather, Zak’s For You page. There is, of course, pleasure in getting the reference, the giggle-by-giggle dopamine hit of feeling like you’re in-the-know enough to keep up with the treadmill of sight gags and quotations. The nicher the joke, the sharper the sense of belonging: Zak’s program bio, for example, is, in fact, a bio for Megan Hilty, a shoutout to Hilty’s bio in the Death Becomes Her program actually being a bio for Meryl Streep. Ginger Twinsies’ sole mode of storytelling is #iykyk. (If you don’t know what that means, then Ginger Twinsies almost certainly is not for you.)

What Titanique did so successfully was to use that discovery of overlapping cultural knowledge between the audience and the artists—my group chat shares the same memes as yours does!—to build a showcase for its performers (they got to stop the show to sing in that one) and to arrive at a place of communal joy, one that even seemed inclusive of audiences who hadn’t gotten most of the jokes along the way.

Ginger Twinsies riffs manically through a particular queer lexicon’s checklist (Jamie Lee Curtis’ Activia commercials! Diana the Musical!) without any culminating payoff and rarely gives anyone in the cast, which includes impressive stage actors like Folds and Lakisha May plus social media stars like Grace Reiter and Mitch Wood, the breathing room to make much of an impression.

The exception is Phillip Taratula as the film’s villainous diva vying to be the twins’ stepmother, “ice woman” Meredith Blake (played on screen by Elaine Hendrix, a part of the play’s producing team). Zak slows down the melee to make space for Taratula’s gregarious drag interpretation of Meredith’s histrionic cruelty and impeccable style: the show’s most effective visual joke is costume designer Wilberth Gonzalez’s series of mis-sized versions of Meredith’s black and white hat. Hendrix’s performance was on a larger scale than the rest of the film and rich with camp (not the summer kind) in a way that merits parodic tribute: It’s only when Meredith is onstage that giving The Parent Trap the Titanique treatment really makes sense.

Otherwise, Zak’s 80 minutes of art by algorithm proves more exhausting than invigorating.