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Phoenix- Remember Debbie? The gal who did Dallas? She’s back.
Hard to conceive, but they’ve made a musical out of the 1978 porn flick about a gal who wants to be a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader so badly that . . . well, we won’t go into that.
Harder yet to believe the show is coming to Phoenix. It’s not your grandma’s Rodgers and Hammerstein. advertisement
Actually, it’s not your daddy’s porn thrill, either. A bit tamer. No nudity. No close-ups during the interesting parts. Lyrics that will curl your toes, though. And dialogue that would curdle Pat Robertson.
Debbie Does Dallas: The Musical was adapted by New York actress-director Erica Schmidt. It played off-Broadway and was a big hit in Australia. Now, the show has caught the attention of the Valley’s Artists Theatre Project. The production opens Friday at the Third Street Theatre under the direction of Jim Linde, the fellow who brought us Pageant, that cross-dressing epic about beauty contests.
Debbie Does Dallas doesn’t trash its source so much as offer “a parody of the whole adult film genre,” Linde says. “It’s meant to be titillating and funny at the same time. The erotic scenes are treated with a big dose of humor.”
Make no mistake, it’s still risqué business.
“We deal with just about every kind of physicality you can imagine,” Linde says. “The challenge is to do it without turning people off or turning the show into an adult film. We want to keep the audience surprised, somewhat shocked, somewhat titillated and still laughing through it all.”
Jenny Lopercio portrays the cheerleading wannabe.
“I can’t honestly say I relate to Debbie,” the actress says, “but it’s been very interesting trying to figure her out. She has large dreams, but she doesn’t realize that the price of what she’s doing isn’t worth it – in my eyes, anyway. For Debbie, it definitely is.”
Crazy as it sounds, this salacious muck-about works as a musical.
“When I started reading the script, I had no idea. Whoa! What is this?” Lopercio says. “But it was just so funny. It’s disturbing, disgusting and hilarious at the same time.”
Seth Bogner is Rick, Debbie’s boyfriend. It’s, pardon the expression, the bimbo role.
“He’s the typical movie high-school jock guy,” Bogner says, “with nothing going on in his head.”
Not much going on with the rest of him, either.
“Considering what Debbie does for money, she doesn’t pay that much attention to him in that area,” the actor sighs.
Like most of the cast, Bogner found the movie a hoot when Linde screened it.
“It’s very ’70s porn with all the tacky over-moaning you’d expect,” he says. “It was hard to watch with a straight face.”
Lopercio isn’t quite as kind. “We were laughing and wanting to vomit at the same time,” she says.
Tamed down as it is, does the musical still do a fair job by its X-rated source material?
“If I were rating it, I would . . . well, I definitely wouldn’t allow my little sister to see it,” Lopercio says. “But I think it would be OK for my grandmother and parents, so what’s that? A PG-13? No, I just thought of a couple of scenes. It’s definitely an R.”