Rogue Music Theatre

IT'S NEWS... IT'S NOW... IT'S NUNSENSE!

With Li'l Abner tabled for 2012, ROGUE MUSIC THEATRE looked for a replacement with a unique story, memorable characters, upbeat music, laugh-out-loud dialog, and fun by the freezer-full. We all agreed -- That would be Nunsense: The Mega Musical. 

We aren't alone in our enthusiasm for Nunsense. The original show previewed off-Broadway in 1985 and was the second longest running off-Broadway show in history, with over 3,500 performances. Along the way, it won the Outer Critics' Circle Award as Best Musical of 1986, with Best Music, Best Book, and an award for one of the original cast members -- awards that author Dan Goggin says gave the show "validity" from the non-Catholic world. Before it closed its original run, Nunsense had been translated into 26 languages and performed in 8,000 other locations worldwide.

Over the decades, more than 25,000 women have played Nunsense roles (with names like Sister Mary Myopia and Sister Julia, Child of God) and box office intake has exceeded $500 million.

What explains the show's popularity? For one thing, author Dan Goggin provides a unique comedic peek into the world of the monastery: He himself was a seminarian, and his humor is not mean-spirited. Rather, he finds a tone that is both wildly comical and affectionate.  When he was working on a TV movie rendition, Dan Goggin reiterated his standards for success. "I would love the movie to be a hit," the author confesses, "but I would rather have it bomb, and not be offensive..."

It hasn't bombed yet.

Stephen Holden once wrote in The New York Times ("Musical Re-creates Old Broadway on Off Broadway”), “… fans of oldtime musical comedy need not despair. Wacky fun, uproarious horseplay, and side-splitting jokes are doing just fine Off Broadway. Nunsense is a madcap revue that satirizes convent life with a hysterical anything-goes sense of fun. The show's very premise is outrageous.”

In Back Stage (1996), Martin Schaeffer raved, "Nunsense… is the wittiest, most fun-filled evening of musical comedy to hit this berg since George Hearn sang 'I Am What I Am.' The upbeat score, by composer/lyricist Dan Goggin, pulses with both merriment and a fine sense of the subtly dramatic. Nunsense is good old-fashioned comedy at its best:  It is quick-paced, generally raucous, occasionally touching, and totally wonderful."