Under the influence

Great musicals are like great drugs. An audience watching heightened emotions captured in catchy songs and graceful dances should experience a natural high, without suffering such side effects as a craving for Twinkies or Munchos.

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Horizon Theatre and Dad's Garage Theatre both have new musicals on the boards, one a cosmopolitan tale of renewed marriage and male bonding, the other a satire of antique, ill-informed propaganda about the perils of "mari-huana." Unexpectedly, the pot play proves not only more entertaining, but more comfortable with the musical format. Horizon's The Thing About Men turns out to be a bit of a bummer, despite its talented, versatile cast, while Dad's Garage's Reefer Madness: The Musical, though more rough around the edges, leaves the other show in a cloud of sweetish-smelling smoke.

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Both shows derive from movies, although neither is as familiar as such Broadway blockbusters as The Producers or Hairspray. In The Thing About Men, lyricist Joe DiPietro and composer Jimmy Roberts adapt Men..., a now-obscure but funny 1986 German rom-com. Reefer Madness covers slightly more familiar ground in the 1936 propaganda film turned midnight-movie mainstay.

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Right at the top, The Thing About Men claims that it's an unconventional, anti-love story. "What we've got here is more realistic/A husband, a wife, and things get sadistic," croon the delightful Abby Parker and Brandon O'Dell, the chorus and supporting players. Philandering ad executive Tom (Jeff McKerley), learning that his wife Lucy (Sara Onsager) has been having her own affair, moves out. Tom stalks her lover, bohemian artist Sebastian (David Howard), and rents Sebastian's spare room with vague thoughts of vengeance. The odd couple become surprise friends, however, so Tom must figure out a way to win back Lucy while keeping his identity secret.

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As the title suggests, the play touches on the competing brands of contemporary masculinity, with Tom representing financial success and Sebastian a more "free and easy" sensuality. But DiPietro and Roberts demonstrate even less social insight than they brought to their previous show, I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change. A hit for Horizon Theatre earlier this decade, Now Change offered droll but utterly forgettable observations on gender differences at about the level of "Everybody Loves Raymond."

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The Thing About Men, despite featuring a skilled cast, proven director Heidi Cline and a premise worthy of classic sex farce, emphasizes dull observations and bland arrangements, particularly in such sentimental slop as "Make Me a Promise, Thomas." McKerley finds some poignancy in "The Better Man Won," and the brief, final number's amusing assertion that "You Can't Have it All" suggests a better starting place for a show than a climax.

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Even before it begins, Reefer Madness, directed by Kate Warner, shows a clever sense of play through the set's witty, monochromatic color scheme that evokes the black-and-white film. Creators Kevin Murphy and Dan Studney cleverly revise Reefer Madness for live theater as a high school production, narrated by a crusading adult (Doyle Reynolds). Some of the choreography stays deliberately stiff, like a student musical, which both provides laughs and disguises some of the performers' limitations.

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We meet squeaky-clean teenagers, Jimmy (Joey Ellington) and Mary (Jessie Dean), who are on the verge of going steady. Alas, Jimmy hears jazz music at the local Five and Dime, then succumbs to pressure to visit to "the local reefer den." Jimmy takes his first hit of a joint and hallucinates a screamingly funny, orgiastic — and full-color — number featuring girls in grass skirts, a giant, tentacled hookah and dancing goat-men.

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Jimmy's descent into addiction, loose sex and murder moves so quickly that Reefer Madness feels excessively stretched out over two acts. Generally, the actors find pathos in their caricatured roles, like the way Suehyla El-Attar finds incongruous humor when she sings about how she puts up with her abusive boyfriend in exchange for "The Stuff." At first, Dean gives Mary a funny Betty Boop delivery then turns her into an insatiable dominatrix, thanks to the wicked weed.

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Unlike Dad's recent pop-icon musicals, such as Debbie Does Dallas: The Musical two years ago, Reefer Madness finds some substantial context beyond spoofing an easy target. Murphy and Studney use snappy melodies and witty rhymes to turn the original film as a parable of conservative hysteria and public deception. Reefer Madness hits the point home amusingly — if none-too-subtly — in the ironically titled final number "Tell 'Em The Truth": "Once the reefer has been destroyed/We'll start on Darwin and Sigmund Freud."

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In capturing the ridiculously false implications of marijuana use, as well as the hysteria behind the original film, Reefer Madness touches on larger-than-life sensations. The Thing About Men flirts with potent ideas about marriage's dark corners and the borderline homoerotic attraction between the leads, but so timidly avoids anything provocative that the show never seems to find anything really worth singing about. In contrast, Reefer Madness' best moments provide enough intoxication that you needn't fall prey to the mind-altering influence of that "leafy-green assassin."