Review: The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse, a Musical Collision of Pop Trash and True Crime

Remember 2006? The TikTok sleuths at the center of Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley’s marvelously unhinged new musical, The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse, do … at least, they think they do. Sixteen years old, they weren’t actually alive when Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsay Lohan climbed into a car and were dubbed “3 bimbos of the apocalypse” by the New York Post; but they cannot stop thinking about that photograph, which Bookworm (Patrick Nathan Falk) claims “created the digital dystopia we live in today.”

He runs a channel with Earworm (Luke Islam), a fellow connoisseur of the noughties who has previously expounded on the relationship between Juicy Couture tracksuits and 9/11. When they say they inhabit a digital dystopia, they mean it. Earworm and Bookworm live in different states and have never met in person. Brainworm (Milly Shapiro), who runs a separate channel about missing girls, hasn’t left her bedroom in four years. She’s the first to notice the young woman lingering just outside of the frame—the fourth bimbo. Who is she? What happened to her?

Armed with their smartphones and the Perez Hilton archives, they set out to uncover the truth about the death of a failed-to-launch pop star named Coco (Keri René Fuller), her possessive mother (Sara Gettelfinger), and the mysterious third woman (Natalie Walker) who appears in the last selfie Coco ever took. It’s a voyage to a past that still feels fresh to most off-Broadway theatergoers but represents a wilder (and perhaps freer) world to our Gen Z protagonists.

If this all sounds a little too online for a proudly analog form like the theater, you probably never caught Foley and Breslin’s 2021 play Circle Jerk, which was similarly about the digital funhouse we now spend an uncomfortable amount of our lives wandering (Orwell never anticipated that the telescreen would be willingly adopted as a luxury product). The two writers have reunited with the director of that Pulitzer-shortlisted comedy, Rory Pelsue, to create a musical flashback to the Bush administration that is also a disturbing look forward into the slippery reality of the coming decades.

The score (by Breslin, with additional music and lyrics by Foley) is an unmistakable throwback to a time of skinny jeans and fat MP3 players (one especially hears the influence of Lohan’s short-lived music career). With just a five-person band (and two playback engineers, Julianne Merrill and Beto Gonzalez), wizardly music director Dan Schlosberg produces the studio-polished sound essential for both dance tracks and high-flying Emo anthems.

In no song is the effect more spectacular than “I Literally Die,” in which Walker plays a resentful stylist to the not-yet-stars who dishes out horrible fashion advice:

“I need something a little more bananas!
Jane Goodall!
That girl who fucked the apes?!
We slick the hair back, sequin backpack
Wait, what do we think of capes?”

Walker delivers these sick (as in mentally ill) rhymes with a pronounced vocal fry occasionally accented by a Wagnerian operatic soprano. It’s breathtaking, if only because I was laughing so hard.

Unfortunately, not all Breslin and Foley’s demented lyrics come through as clearly. Like so many percussion-heavy musicals, Last Bimbo suffers from sound balance issues (sound design by Megumi Katayama and Ben Truppin-Brown), pitting the vocalists against the music, with lyrics as collateral damage.

But no one can accuse this cast of not putting up a fight. Falk and Islam work up a sweat physically embodying the hustle required to succeed in the attention economy. Both sincere and guarded, Shapiro compellingly portrays a young woman struggling under the weight of emotional baggage. And Gettelfinger dives head-first into a character whose true motives are inscrutable.

Since this is a musical story that plays out almost entirely online, Stephanie Osin Cohen’s set suggests Radio City Music Hall as a holodeck, with scenes materializing and disappearing seemingly with one click. Pelsue maintains a furious pace throughout, reinforced by Jack Ferver’s manic pop choreography and Amith Chandrashaker’s disorienting lighting design. No one is having as much fun as costume designer Cole McCarty, who conjures authentic Iraq War-era fashion alongside the permeant pajama-party duds favored by our cloistered heroes. And really, if you’re only ever going to be seen from the waist up, why bother squeezing into uncomfortable pants and shoes?

Unapologetically campy, Last Bimbo is also stealthily brilliant, pulling back the curtain on the smoke-and-mirrors show that has overtaken much of our culture and politics. This high age of fraud is also a golden opportunity for storytellers, and no theatermakers are seizing it with as much glee as Foley and Breslin.