It has been running for 27 years, but "Beach Blanket Babylon" shows no signs of stopping. Everybody's favorite musical in everybody's favorite city, San Francisco, plays to sellout crowds night after night because it blends zany humor delivered by topnotch performers sporting its trademark hats -- actually not hats oftentimes, but sculptures worn on the head -- everything from pizzas and lamp posts to the San Francisco skyline, complete with a cable car running up and down a hill and the new Pacific Bell ballpark with its much-derided giant Coke bottle and baseball glove.
Created by the late Steve Silver and now produced by his wife, Jo Schuman Silver, "Beach Blanket" remains headline fresh by getting much of its inspiration from today's news and the people who make it. What you see this week might not be what you see next week if some news event has become ripe for satire. In the most recent incarnation, for example, there's a reference to the first daughters' brush with laws against underage drinking. Their dad, the president, appears on a tricycle with his parents. His predecessor, Bill Clinton, is the target of even more humor than when he was in the White House, and of course the former first lady and now New York senator also gets her share of barbs. The California energy crisis finds a Pacific Gas & Electric Co. worker singing "Hello, darkness, my old friend," followed shortly by Bill Gates and an unemployed woman named Dot Com in a polka-dot dress.
Then there are some of the staples: director Kenny Mazlow as a tap-dancing Mr. Peanut and later as a trés gay King Louis XIV, accompanied by three dancing French poodles. Val Diamond, who has been with the show for 23 years, didn't perform the night I was there, but her understudy, Tammy Nelson, was terrific in her multiple incarnations, including a fine rendition of the Patsy Cline standard, "Crazy." Another of the show's longtime powerhouses, Renée Lubin, was there in top form, doing a dead-on imitation of Whoopi Goldberg along with Tina Turner and Snow White's fairy godmother.
The show just zips along with outrageous puns, loony sight gags, those awe-inspiring hats and loads of talent for an hour and a half of nonstop smiles and laughs.