That Terrell does, both in his snappy direction and in his amusingly parodic choreography. He and the small, nimble cast wisely gloss over the beyond-ridiculous plot: A femme fatale lands in Macao, immediately gets a job as a nightclub singer, finds herself entangled with a couple of brooding expatriates and a ridiculous co-worker or two, and everything from a gunfight to a familiar black bird from Malta makes it into the mix. Instead they focus on the groaningly dreadful puns, the deliriously cheesy musical numbers, and the general atmosphere of absurdist spoof.
How bad are the puns? Well, the leading man - given an effortless scummy grace by Brendan McNab, a last-minute sub for the injured Paul Farwell - is named Rick Shaw. You know, so when the leading lady, Aimee Doherty's slinky-silly Lureena, screeches to summon a ride in 1952 Macao, she'll get a . . . Rick Shaw. They quickly exchange sultry glances and silly East-is-East cliches: "Never the twain shall meet," purrs Lureena; Rick asks, "What twain?" so she can answer, "The gwavy twain" - a line that even the script self-mockingly admits makes no sense at all.
And then there's Rick's henchman Tempura - so named, as he mincingly explains, "because I have been battered by life." Boston Conservatory student Austin Ku delivers that line, along with a nonstop battery of exaggerated ethnic stereotypes, with an expert mix of knowingness and innocence. He's the funniest thing onstage, even before the big revelation near the end that takes the showbiz satire to a new level.
