Songs, sex and sly humor provide the middle-age craziness for Rarely Done’s Mid-Life 

Rarely Done Productions’ season opener is a bubbly, sometimes edgy little show weighted down by the year’s worst title, Mid-Life! The Crisis Musical. By no means is this some kind of spinoff of Jennie Linders’ Menopause: The Musical, itself a disguised trade show. The brothers Bob and Jim Walton premiered 17 skits under the title The Eyes are the First to Go (even worse than the unnecessarily hyphenated Mid-Life!) at the New York Musical Theatre Festival in 2004 and have been tweaking and rearranging them ever since. Under Dan Tursi’s sure-handed direction, the laughs are plentiful and all in the right places.

As a concept, Mid-Life! resembles Joe DiPietro’s I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change in that it’s smart, constantly inventive and stronger on verbal wit than memorable music. Whereas I Love You builds on youthful relationships, Mid-Life! riffs on a wider range of themes about people from their mid-30s to their 70s, which means most audiences. While there’s plenty of sex, as in Suzanne Tiffault’s uproarious “Biological Clock,” many more gags are about health and medicine as when a distressed Tiffault (again) finds her breasts caught in the “Musical Mammomatic.” This comes just before the “tap-dancing Pap smear.” The opening number has an eye chart with an impossible-to-read bottom line, a relic from the original title.

While the phrase “a Walton and Walton musical” may not yet have marquee cachet, the brothers have gotten around and earned quality credits. Bob, for example, took an important role in the Broadway production of The Drowsy Chaperone a year ago. The program never indicates who did what, whether words or music, but over the evening we feel two rival sensibilities emerging. One is impish and confrontational, always pushing the envelope, like a skit at a high school reunion in which the women (Aubry Ludington Panek, Tina Lee and Tiffault) consume too much of everything and then reveal far more than they should.

The other sensibility is softer and more ironic, given to an almost Zen-like love of revealing paradox. A helpful “interpreter” steps in to decipher the hidden messages blasting forth from a squabbling couple. Beneath all the bluster, the wife still loves and supports the husband. But hold the sweetness. The husband’s disdain arises from even darker lusts than his anger reveals. 

Deeper still is the number, “The Long Goodbye,” which begins with what looks like a bunch of parents watching their children play in a park. In a shock, just skirting some horribly bad taste, we realize the grown-ups are actually watching their parents, reduced to childishness through dementia and senility. The telling may make this episode sound like a groaner, but the cast eventually proves the dominant themes are acceptance and love.

Truth be told, Mid-Life! has not been taking the country by storm, and reviews of out-of-town productions, mostly in dinner theaters, are not as positive as this one. Director Tursi understands the show belongs in a kind of basement-cabaret-in-the-Village venue, which is what Jazz Central, 441 E. Washington St., feels like. Sets are somewhere between minimal to nondescript, like white chairs and the “Mammomatic” contraption, although every costume and prop earns back its investment. 

The strength of the production, and the volume of the laughter, build on the power of individual performers and what Tursi knows he can get from them. In one number where characters tell us they’re going to fess up and tell us the truth, Panek appears as a Dolly Parton look-alike named Virginia Carlyle with a blonde fright wig and prosthetic mammaries. Along with confessing what’s real and what isn’t, she’s going to tell us her real age, if only she can decide on it.

All six players enjoy star turns, but Mid-Life! is a return to form for Shawn Forster, a veteran player with lots of fans, seen little in recent seasons. When the script calls for comic excess, he’s ready to roll, like the afro-wearing basketball player in “Weekend Warriors,” whose macho aggression is pulled back by a henpecking wife, or the tie-dyed slacker who wants his pregnant girlfriend to move in with the family. As it seems like yesterday when a well-coifed Forster was the lead in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, he’s probably too young for the target demographic of Mid-Life! But as nature has shaved his pate in the interim, he is uniquely prepared for several numbers. Consider the poignancy of the mock torch song, “Lost Love,” in which the singer laments his shedding hair, later found on pillows, in bed and the bathtub drain.

Aubry Ludington Panek retains her street cred as a major comedienne, while Suzanne Tiffault enjoys one of her best sequence of roles in many seasons. Tina Lee, better known for dramatic characters (Wit’s End Players’ 2008 Sweeney Todd), kicks up a ruckus in a series of contrasting portrayals, especially the trailer trash housewife.

Opera singer Peter Irwin enhances his second career as a singer-comedian for Tursi’s Rarely Done, getting some of his best laughs as the beetle-browed hypochondriac who takes a medicine that might cause stigmata in men with comb-overs. Irwin also delivers the show’s most chilling line: “I’m going to take up skydiving at 70 and not pull the cord so my kids don’t have to see me like this.” White-thatched Jimmy Curtin, last seen as Sylvia St. Croix in the Talent Company’s Ruthless, turns out to be a highly trained dancer adept at creating physical comedy with the right steps.

The Waltons’ music might not compel you to buy the CD of the show, but music director Michael Copps is the hardest-working performer in the show. And while Mid-Life! has nothing to teach about coping with the pain and humiliation of aging, sustained laughter is great for commiseration.  

This production runs through Sept. 26.  See Times Table for information.