CRYPTOLINK: Good music and jokes boot 'Bigfoot' past its flawed script

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The rollicking new musical "Bigfoot and Other Lost Souls" seems to have lost its way en route to a convincing final curtain. The fault is not the energetic, entertaining and stick-in-your-head tunes by composer Mark Hollmann of "Urinetown" fame, but a story with so many fat threads that author Adrien Royce can't gracefully strand them together.

The main character, Bernie (Rachel Landon) is a Hollywood wannabe hired to hack out a script for a documentary about Bigfoot by a pair of sasquatch hunters (Eric Cover and Patricia Hull) in Northern California. In taking the job, she splits up with her boyfriend Max (Luke Bartholomew) and picks up Rudy (Enrique Bravo), who is pictured above, and who is pursued by two squabbling FBI agents (Jerry Demmert and Heidi Poet) and an earthy county sheriff (Margeaux Ljundberg) for long-past protest activities involving explosives.

So far, so good. Take that setup to a dozen members of the local Saturday aspiring writers coffee club and you'll probably get three viable or even terrific endings.

The visual and verbal jokes dependably drew snorts from the audience -- Max in a dress, a phone booth in the woods, Bernie trying to sing from a hospital bed in a state of sedation. And several big musical numbers were enthusiastically received. Hull's excoriation of the most famous Bigfoot hunter, "Roger Patterson," was a tour de force. Several ensembles were show-stoppers, including "Behind Every Man," "You're Not the Boss of Me" and the two dovetailing scenes that ended Act I ("Searching") and started Act II ("Just One Footprint"). Lively performances by the singing actors and choreography by director Elizabeth Lucas and Ricci Adan made these parts worth going back for a second look.