Review: Gooey's Toxic Aquatic Adventure, a Love Letter to a Rotting City

Ah, the magic of theater: finding yourself deeply moved as you watch a mermaid born from the toxic sludge of the Gowanus Canal caressing her mother’s severed hand while she’s being serenaded by “an anthromorphized collection of chemical runoff and human waste.” Follow the flow of the sewage in Gooey’s Toxic Aquatic Adventure, the lovely, lunatic new musical at the Bushwick Starr, and you’ll be richly, if sometimes queasily, rewarded.

In Gooey’s prologue, Juanda Pudín (La Daniella, also the show’s conceiver, book writer, and co-lyricist), the newly crowned Miss Gowanus, falls fatally into the canal while giving birth as her gangster baby daddy looks on unsympathetically.

Thirty years later, in 2028, that baby’s grown up to be Gooey (also La Daniella), a “sorta mermaid” living in Newtown Creek, after the monopolizing mayor Fred Boss (León Ramos Tak) has transformed Gowanus into the commercialized G’Wond’rLand, chlorinated the canal, and killed off all the rats. Gooey dreams of stardom, so off she goes to G’Wond’rLand where — a la Elphaba by way of Urinetown — she becomes persona non grata while uncovering Boss’s lies and crooked past.

The story’s kookiness, however charmingly presented, can muddy the waters where La Daniella’s social consciousness is concerned. Yes, Gooey’s Toxic Aquatic Adventure, produced in association with ¡Oye! Group, is meant as a biting social satire on gentrification, pollution, and corruption in local politics, but it’s a bit too fantastical and flighty to sink its teeth all the way in. (The real Newtown Creek, for what it’s worth, is just about as toxic in 2026 as the show imagines it will be two years from now.)

But that light-footedness is okay, because Sammy Zeisel’s smart, puppet-driven staging and La Daniella and Ben Langhorst’s swanky throwback score keep the good-natured energy ever-aloft. The show is low budget but slick, with fun light cues from Kyle Stamm and a set that’s more layered than it looks by Cat Raynor. And the songs, which sound like they could have bobbed along in a forgotten musical from 1966, are well-crafted and clever in their specificity. The opening number rhymes “carcinogenic tar pits” and “rolled up bunch of carpets.” Music director Jon Schneidman provides spirited piano accompaniment.

Best of all, three stars are born from the slime. Tak is a delicious baddie, with the pipes of a young Jack Cassidy. Amanda Centeno brings a foul-mouthed grouchiness and tremendous low belt to Scabby the Rat, a loner with a heart of gold and a persuasive redemption arc. Sushma Saha delivers a commanding sauciness and singular vibrato to the aforementioned sludge (the delightful puppet designs are by Gaby Febland). They sing with the sort of appealingly distinctive voices too absent from musical theater performance these days.

As their giddy, goofy ringleader, La Daniella portrays Gooey with a blissed-out ditz that’s hard not to warm to. However, she’s co-written a score that exceeds her own vocal capacity. She reaches beyond her range with gusto, but the audible strain towards the high notes often distracts. The show, which feels about 20 minutes too long, can also kill some of its daffiest darlings that showcase its star. We could do with much less of an early variety show segment in which Gooey ventriloquizes a pigeon corpse and a pizza box.

But if Gooey’s Toxic Aquatic Adventure adventures onward, and it should, the obvious solution is to change the keys, not the performer. In Gooey’s unsinkable optimism, La Daniella makes sense of the show’s tone and sets the standard for the cartoonish Brooklyn accents that even extend to the written stage directions in the script (“Da Manhattan skyline glitters in da distance”). I wouldn’t want to see the show without her.

Anyway, who needs perfection when you have putrefaction? It’s da best love letter to a rotting city in town.