Those evil-natured robots, they’re programmed to destory us. But some of them want to evolve beyond their initial programming, like, say, a puny human raised in a dysfunctional family.

There’s really no easy way to summarize Open Drawer Theatre Company’s apeshit hilarious Please Listen: A Musical Chaos that won’t make it sound terrible. Musical parodies are a Fringe staple, but they’re a bitch to pull off: Aside from the fact that the stage musical is already a highly self-referential form, there’s the problem of proficiency. Flight of the Conchords and those Lonely Island music videos wouldn’t be half as funny as if their creators didn’t have musical chops at least somewhere in the same room as those of the folks they’re satirizing.

The large cast led by winning co-stars (and co-writers) Mark Halpern and Aaron Bliden in Please Listen have that covered: The least among them can still kind of sing and dance, the best seem to have a shot at long careers, and every one of them is wholly in tune with the show’s Ed Wood-ian sensibility.

The plot is simplicity itself: Bandmates Arlo and Donovan kidnap a record executive and force him to listen as they perform their concept album in the hope of persuading him to offer them a contract. We see the invasion-by-robots storyline of their opus, Overwhelming Stimulus, performed before us as a musical-within-a-musical, even as we continue to follow the hostage drama that’s forever threatening to turn into an episode of Behind the Music. Listening to original tunes like “Damn Downright Good Time” (I think; the titles aren’t listed in the program), you’ll wonder how Radiohead’s albums about subjugation by a malevolent technocracy all turned out to be such bummers. You may also ask yourself how director Cory Ryan Frank made the Baldachhino Gypsy Tent suddenly smell like bacon at the precise moment the cast sings the line, “put in the griddle and make it sizzle” or something to that effect. I might have jotted the words down wrong; I was suddenly very hungry.

Halpern, Bliden, and Frank keep changing the game, shifting whose story this is and what rules govern its telling, sometimes within a single scene. Case in point: When a band fight breaks out in the middle of one number, every cast member of the within-the-play-play holds in place until the Arlo and Donovan patch things up and resume their song. That same degree of discipline elevates the acting, the musical performances, the choreography, everything. To be this funny, you've got to take what you're doing seriously.

Please Listen: A Muscial Chaos (written by Mark Halpern & Aaron Bliden; directed by Cory Ryan Frank; approx. 85 min.) is at the Baldachhino Gypsy Tent at Fort Fringe tonight at 9:45 p.m., Friday, July 24 at 10 p.m., and Sunday, July 26 at 3:15 p.m.

Filed in Arts and Events and tagged capital fringe, fringe festival, musicals, robots, theater