THEATER - "How to Save the World and Find True Love in 90 Minutes"

When a musical manages to live up to its title and nothing else, you know there's a problem. The one true thing about How to Save the World and Find True Love in 90 Minutes is that it's 90 minutes. That the creators, Jonathan Karp and Seth Weinstein, make fun of this in the program or that they'd call this an homage to Frank Loesser just shows how lost they are with this post-Fringe (but barely) show. Lately, there's been a little too much camp in the musical theater, especially at New World Stages (though Evil Dead justifies itself through a built-in fan base, a more stylized score, and far more talented performers), and How to Save the World... never manages to rise above its premise. The show's also incredibly dated, relying so heavily on current events for cheap jokes (Madonna's baby, the South Beach diet, &c.) that there's never any build, just a never-ending stream of superficiality. (Okay, some of it--like the insulting description of a "neo-feminist Buddhist Henry Higgins"--is a guilty pleasure. And there are a few moments of wit: "Everybody I know is a disgruntled employee. You ever hear of a gruntled employee?")

Save for those few spots of color, this is an otherwise monotone paint-by-numbers musical. Our shy and reluctant hero Miles Muldoon (Michael McEachran) gets a unique chance to get the girl he wants, only to find that he's really in love with his best friend. To distinguish this from the others just like it, Karp digs deep into a random pool of happenstance and decides that Miles will become telepathic. But telepathic by means of a freak accident...like, say, getting conked on the head by a flying melon. But not just any melon: a melon thrown by an angry Guatemalan farmer. Follow that logic a little further and it's only inevitable that Miles is beaned by fruit because he's trying to impress the girl of his dreams with his diplomatic prowess. (At this point, it should be noted that the show takes place in the UN.)

Assuming that Miles's ability to read minds can only lead to hilarity, Karp comes up with a grammatical twist, and tweaks the plot so that Miles's diplomatic crush, Violet Zipper (Nicole Ruth Snelson) turns out to be dating a terrorist who, for anonymity, she refers to as He. Hence the thought "I love it when He looks at me like that," only encourages Miles, and by the time he realizes there's a plot to infect the UN with a nausea-inducing virus, he's only got ten minutes left for a climactic showdown. (It should be mentioned that Mr. McEachran doubles as "He," an obvious device that sets up a gut-bustingly funny fight scene -- director Christopher Gattelli doesn't have much to work with, but at least he nails this part.)

Got your checklist out? There are meta jokes about a power ballad sung by the delightful Anika Larson (as the best-friend-who-saves-the-day, Julie Lemmon), random appearances by manic characters like a yogi, a gay therapist, and, of course, Condoleeza Rice, and, for some reason, a Greek chorus (who double as those three characters). How To Save the World is so strung out, it might as well be a junkie--it certainly isn't any good while sober.