Debbie Does Dallas

They Say...

Review by William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide

The subject matter of stage musicals has been becoming more unusual, especially the musicals originating at the New York International Fringe Festival, which was the birthplace of Urinetown, a seemingly unlike property that went all the way to Broadway. The festival also marked the first presentation of a musical based on the infamous pornographic film Debbie Does Dallas in 2001, resulting in an off-Broadway production that opened in Greenwich Village on October 29, 2002. The show, composed by Andrew Sherman, follows the plot of the movie, adding a few extra elements. (Well, the original plot, in which the members of a cheerleading team sell their virtue to raise money for a trip, may be enough for a film largely devoted to sex scenes, but a show needs at least a little more.) Sherman and collaborators Erica Schmidt and Tom Kitt have written only nine songs, but the cast album runs nearly 74 minutes due to the inclusion of much of the show's dialogue (as well as karaoke versions of two songs and the "bonus track," "The Orgasm Medley," in which cast members practice screams of ecstasy). Sherman of course takes a satiric view of the proceedings, with the simple-minded cheerleaders ending all conversations with an abrupt "Ok, 'bye," but he plays things straight a surprisingly large amount of the time. The music is closer to 1970s pop/rock than to traditional show music, and the cast performs it well. But ultimately there isn't much to Debbie Does Dallas, the musical. Sherman has not used the property to comment on pornography or social mores or anything else, really. His most provocative idea seems to have been to turn the movie into a show in the first place, and it may be that that's enough to keep an audience in the theater amused. But the music, interrupted by long stretches of dialogue, is not compelling enough to make many musical theater fans play this disc more than once or twice.