The hair is big in Stale Magnolias: The Musical. The humor comes in small, medium, and only occasionally, large. Before it became a musical, Sean Owens' beauty-parlor comedy was first staged in 2009 in a beauty parlor, and the novelty of that probably helped ramp up the laughs. Now a musical edition is at Oasis, and it's a bit of a letdown at the venue where the redoubtable D'Arcy Drollinger and Heklina often hold forth.
This is a not a hoot-and-hollerin' affair, though it often seems the dialogue is aimed toward that end. But then a wan punchline arrives, deflating the anticipation built by the setup. Still, there are laughs to be had, more reliably arising from situations and performances rather than the words themselves. The new sink girl with a corpse in her car's trunk, bull semen in the water supply causing male-pattern baldness in women, and a child sired by a hermaphroditic celebrity are among the situations the denizens of the Last Chance Salon must face.
The setting is Rectal, Texas, which is signal enough that the script has not been written with too sharp a pencil. But no matter how low the brow, when you have a gathering of characters (mostly) in drag in a beauty parlor in a dusty burg, the ripostes need zing from some sort of wit that can be crude or clever or even just gross. Insults and bitchery are rightly expected, but something stronger than, say, "She looks like the Lusitania after it sunk" is needed.
The songs created for this musical adaptation of Owens' play �" he provided the lyrics for Don Seaver's music �" can help boost the proceedings. A duet of hate between archrivals has energetic venom, helped by the strong performances from Jef Valentine and Robert Molossi as Last Stop regulars, and Michael Phillis, as a space-cadet sink girl, gets laughs out of a sung murder confession.
But some of the songs don't fit even a loose interpretation of the loose proceedings. The cast sings about "the hottest wheels in town" in a song that seems inspired by Grease, though it starts well enough as a quite funny Drew Todd as the meanest gal in town starts rocking out in her wheelchair. Marilynn Fowler as the owner of the salon has to deliver a solemn song about her mother's suicide in an uneasy shift in tone. If there is no meaningful need to go down that dark road, at least another serious moment, still slightly odd, has a context as breast cancer and falsies are revealed in a scene led by a roller-skating Latina played by Jerry Navarro.
Director Cora Values, outfitted in her signature role as the proprietress of the Gas n Gulp, also serves as an amiable hostess. Jef Valentine's costumes are properly, and increasingly, outrageous, but it's the wigs by Jordan L'Moore that reach as high as an elephant's eye.
Stale Magnolias will run through Aug. 6 at Oasis. Tickets are $25-$35, available at sfoasis.com.