Have you heard about the five nuns who need to bury their 52 sisters after a vichyssoise gone terribly wrong?
Put down your tissues. This isn’t a sad tale, but a musical frolic — who knew nuns could be so funny?
“Nunsense” is Funky Little Theater Company’s second musical, their first being “Spamalot” in 2019. It opens Friday at Westside Community Center and runs through Nov. 20.
“When you sit in rehearsal and everything seems right,” said director and Funky founder Chris Medina, “you think, ‘Wow, maybe we’ve got something here, like magic in a bottle,’ like happened with ‘Spamalot.’ This show has a lot of humor that’s similar to ‘Spamalot’ and ‘Monty Python.’”
Writer, composer and lyricist Dan Goggin unearthed gold in the early ’80s when he dreamed up a line of greeting cards featuring a nun with an acerbic tongue. The cards became so popular he decided to expand the concept and turned them into a cabaret show, “The Nunsense Story.”
It also was a hit, and Goggin once again went bigger, turning the cabaret into “Nunsense,” a full-length show. The musical comedy opened off-Broadway in 1985 and ran for a decade, making it the second longest-running show in off-Broadway history.
The show, which Goggin also adapted for TV, has generated six sequels and three spinoffs — and if all goes well with Funky’s production, Medina hopes to do more with the nutty nuns.
“It is wacky and hysterical,” said choreographer Cara Marshall, who also stars as Sister Mary Amnesia, a nun who lost her memory when a crucifix fell on her head. “There’s nothing better than laughing.”
After the cook at Little Sisters of Hoboken accidentally kills 52 residents of the convent with tainted soup, the surviving nuns must cover their burial costs. So they start a greeting card company that’s so successful the Reverend Mother thinks it’s financially safe to buy a VCR and camcorder for the convent.
Wrong.
The nuns decide to stage a variety show to raise more money for their last four sisters, whose bodies are stuffed in a freezer.
“There’s a song called, ‘We’ve Got to Clean Out the Freezer,’” Medina said. “People say, ‘Isn’t it sacrilegious?’ I think it’s tongue in cheek. If you went to Catholic school or church, there’s tons of stuff that will take you back to your glory days.”
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