Fin and Bear It: “The Mermaids,” at the Timber Lake Playhouse through August 30

For the second consecutive year, the Timber Lake Playhouse is closing its summer season with an original musical in the “Andy Bro Show New Works Commission,” an initiative named after the venue's 1961 founder and first artistic director. Mr. Bro passed away in (pre-COVID) 2020 at age 89, and I can only imagine how honored he'd be to see his name attached to annual presentations of world premieres – shows boasting the exceptional talent, on- and off-stage, continually lured to his theatre in the woods. That being said, and having nothing but admiration and gratitude for Timber Lake's series, I think The Mermaids may have broken my brain.

Given its general outline, the show shouldn't be that hard to follow; it's essentially Little Miss Sunshine with an aquatic bent. (I was tempted to write “aquatic hook,” but the fish entendre, as you'll discover, is already super-abundant.) Yet I honestly can't recall when I last spent so much actively focused time trying to simply understand a musical, and I can only partly blame book writer, composer, and lyricist Billy Reece for my bafflement. My guess is that a lot of my questions – and they are myriad – are actually answered in Reece's script and score. But through a combination of director Tommy Ranieri's cast spending much of the first half speaking at warp-speed and the muddying amplification of the performers' body mics, I felt colossally in-the-dark about even The Mermaids' most basic elements. I think I figured most of them out on the 75-minute drive home, but that didn't make the intermission-less 100 minutes inside the Mt. Carroll theatre any easier.

What I know for sure is that, before Saturday's matinée presentation began, scenic designer Vincent Gunn's set initially appeared wrapped in sheets of semi-translucent plastic – enormous shower liners, essentially. Poking her head through a center-liner slit, the first performer to appear was Jazmin Rhodes. So far, so good. Every show should open with Jazmin Rhodes; extraordinarily beautiful and possessing a Heaven-sent voice, Timber Lake's Eponine from its June production of Les Misérables sets an amazingly high bar from the start. Her fish tail, meanwhile, immediately suggests that Rhodes is playing a mermaid. But before we can glean more, she and the plastic sheet vanish, and we're at a dilapidated public pool – which may or may not be attached to a motel – in Prairie Springs, Oklahoma.

Tending to the pool, professionally or otherwise, is Gabriella Joy Rodriguez's Mikayla, who fishes out a dead rat while singing her excitement about the season ahead, in which she'll reunite with friends at what we're told is among the few bodies of water within miles. In quick succession, her “pod” pals arrive: Maya (Gabriela Hernandez), Mikayla's devoted bestie and, as implied by her eyeglasses, the group's smart, sensible one; Josephine (Elana Simard), a brash force of nature with money and a heavy native accent; and Will (Greyson Taylor), the pod's upbeat, out-and-proud merman. And not long after their peppy opening number, visiting outsider Thani (Courtney Bassett) shows up, a Facebook recommendation having made her curious about this mermaid-based cabal in Nowheresville OK.

This gets us about 15 minutes into The Mermaids, and I was already confused, my head-scratching prompted by a seemingly easy-to-deduce query: Were Mikayla and company actual mermaids? I have zero familiarity with the practice of LARP-ing (Live Action Role Playing). So when our “Lakers” – as they're referenced numerous times in the program's actor bios but, to my memory, not once in the show's book – talked about being antsy to get to the pool after spending their “human time” working at Starbucks and Sonic and other low-status jobs, I took it as gospel. It's a musical, for Pete's sake: Why not honest-to-God mermaids? And when Thani pulled out her own purchased mermaid tail and the aghast group gasped, Mikayla vociferously stating that “We are not LARP-ing!”, I presumed that the human Thani had accidentally stumbled upon a crew of legit sea creatures. It sure seemed that way when, minutes after their introduction, and in private, Mikayla appeared to make a potion out of chlorine and other solvents and summoned the spirit of Rhodes' Amarantha, the women proceeding to talk about how much they missed one another and about Amarantha's life in Atlantis.

But I guess I was wrong. (Maybe? Partially?) Despite the protestations, these people are LARP-ing … and given their plethora of fish puns, doing a particularly annoying job of it. Hey, I'm not averse to puns, as literally thousands of Reader movie/theatre-review headlines (including this one's) will attest. For nearly a half-hour, though, it's rare that a single sentence passes without a marine-life-based eye-roller. It's not “thank you”; it's “tank you.” It's “gills gone wild.” It's “for shore.” It's “Koi vey!” It's excruciating. And even when events in the show's second half turn dramatic, or rather melodramatic, this conversational habit never goes away; it merely lessens. It's the sort of dopey, obvious running-gag routine that makes you lose faith in a play, and makes you feel bad for the gifted actors forced into uttering these unworthy groaners.

Eventually, a Mermaids plot emerges, as a trip to Oklahoma City's tourist-trap aquarium reveals that the annual MerCon convention will be held in Long Island, and Mikayla decides that she and her pals should turn pro and compete for the coveted “Best Mermaid” and “Best Pod” prizes. (There's also a “Best Tail” trophy that even the script doesn't seem much interested in.) Despite it introducing a sweet romantic subplot for Maya and jaunty dolphin handler Bryan (Matthew Hommel), and despite it delivering the major pleasure of Jaime Lyn Beatty's blissfully egocentric, three-time “Best Mermaid” winner Arianne, the Oklahoma City shift opens the door to even more maddeningly unanswered questions. (I won't even bother to ask how designer Gunn's beautifully solid Prairie Springs pool area was also expected to replicate the O.C. aquarium when the “scenic change” merely involved pulling out two vague, unused, desk-like blocks and no noticeable alterations in designer Samantha Weiser's lighting plot.)

What, for example, does “turning pro” mean in this context? Is being a full-time mermaid a legit career of some kind? (The extent of the pro-ness, here, involves the pod enduring potentially amusing slapstick we're not allowed to witness: a disastrous gig at a child's birthday party that we're merely told of.) Even though there's no water in the Timber Lake pool, why are we deprived the sight of our pod practicing whatever act might land them a Long Island win? Why is Simard's Josephine granted a whole song about how her wealthy daddy – bull-testicle magnate Dick Nutter (ugh) – won't see his 10-grand investment recouped if they lose when there's no mention of a cash prize, certainly not a $10,000 one, for winning? Granted, being a full-time mer-person might be preferable – or, you know, not – to working full-time at Starbucks or Sonic. But Reece's musical, in its current incarnation, gives us no idea of what life might look like for its finned and bedazzled hopefuls if their wildest dreams do come true, which makes this a musical with no true stakes. Or rather, no stakes for an audience. Characters might be devastated by not being named “Best Mermaid Pod,” but in the event of their failure, plenty of The Mermaids' patrons will likely be relieved that these LARP-ing kids can now go back to getting a weekly paycheck.

If it reads as though I'm being excessively harsh on Reece's word premiere, that's kind of by design. I have yet to meet a theatre creative who didn't appreciate feedback – even negative feedback – on projects that have never before been seen by paying crowds. This one feels far from unsalvageable. It just feels about four or five drafts away from completion. Plus, in deference to Reece, many of the problems here seemed site-specific. Slowing down the tempo on the quick-witted dialogue, even slightly, would certainly help. We don't know these people and, more importantly, we don't know the show yet – we can't rely on musical muscle memory to get us through passages we can't comprehend in the moment. And seriously, sound designer Evan J. Lettieri: The levels on Saturday afternoon were way too loud. Yes, I'm speaking as a near-decrepit patron who'll turn 60 in 22 short months. But between the actors' belting and the “this goes to 11” arena-rock presentation (which was perfectly appropriate for Ranieri's Les Miz), I missed out on lyrical exposition, intent, meaning … . Late in the show, there's a group number titled “If It Weren't for Her,” and not only did the over-amplified vocals prevent me from comprehending who, exactly, the “her”s were, but I had to stifle a laugh when the tune ended, and the next line heard found Bryan – in an adjacent scene – saying, “I didn't like that.” My silent retort: I didn't, either.

Beyond getting rid of, like, 90 percent of the fish puns, I think Reece has his own work to do. I applaud him for a score that didn't instinctively remind me of other songs, and a few of his compositions, such as “Do It” and “Aquarium Café,” are real winners. But I'd argue that Reece really needs to clarify the basic premise for the LARP-ignorant among us, establish greater narrative peril, and perhaps ditch a few references that, at least on Saturday, fell on deaf ears. (Despite being one of the younger patrons in attendance, and based on the nonexistent laughs of those around me, I was likely one of very few who clocked the nod to 1990's Cher flick Mermaids.) I'd posit that we also need less thematic whiplash. In The Mermaids' first half, and aside from some mild melancholy involving Mikayla and Thani, it's all cheeky jokes and goofiness. In the one-act's second half, Reece's material turns on a dime with conversation involving accidental death, suicide, misogyny, drag-bashing, co-dependence, insanity, and a potential lawsuit. (To the aural displeasure of the patrons sitting in front of me, the F-bomb was also dropped three times.) There's nothing wrong with any of that – though it did cause Ranieri's cast to indulge in more showboating, daytime-drama acting than I would've preferred. But it would've been nice to have some hints about the show's dark descent in the first half before it was wholly unleashed in the second.

If anyone here gets a wholly deserved get-out-of-jail-free card, it's the madly inventive costume designer Brendan McCann, and when they're not rushing their conversation or angling for a defunct Soap Opera Digest Award, Ranieri's vocal-powerhouse cast is spectacularly entertaining and committed. Were Reece's an established musical that didn't require quite so much first-impression analysis, I could've easily composed a full paragraph on every performer's merits, particularly those of the affecting, divinely complicated Rodriguez, the hysterically inventive Beatty, and the soulfully acerbic Bassett, whose thunderously good “Somebody Else” solo is this musical's easy highlight, suggesting what Reece might've done – might still do? – were he to adapt Margot's Got Money Troubles. Yet the most emblematic moment of The Mermaids might've been its curtain call, when, despite the wondrous accompaniment of conductor and keyboard player Matthew W. Suricon throughout, the show's five-person orchestra played absolutely nothing while the actors took their bows. The show got a (mostly) standing ovation. But the absence of music still made Reece's world premiere feel awkwardly unfinished … which made the moment perfectly encapsulate the experience as a whole.

The Mermaids runs at the Timber Lake Playhouse (8215 Black Oak Road, Mt. Carroll IL) through August 30, and more information and tickets are available by calling (815)244-2035 and visiting TimberLakePlayhouse.org.