Where the hell is Cy Coleman when you need him?

I'm jaded. I admit it freely, bright green jaded when it comes to musical theatre. Having grown up seeing and hearing musicals by the likes of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Rodgers and Hart, Mary Rodgers, Richard's daughter, (Once Upon a Mattress), Adam Guettel, his grandson, (Light in the Piazza), Cy Coleman, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Stephen Sondheim... well, you get the idea-  after 80 years of listening to writers for the musical stage of this calibre, one gets to be able to discriminate between Veuve Clicot and Thunderbird, musically speaking.

That Rodgers family was a sort of modern herd of Bachs, weren't they?

All this is a preamble to my discussing tonight's première of Mormons, Mothers, and Monsters at Barrington Stage 2. Veuve Clicot it ain't.

The book and lyrics are by Sam Salmond and seem to be a recitation of his trip through psychoanalysis. He, or the hero, was born into a Mormon family. A fairly dysfunctional Mormon family, apparently. His mother remarried a number of times. Like Mae West, she apparently never met a man she didn't marry. As husbands go, hers did. She is presented as a very controlling factor in the young man's life.

To make the cheese more binding, the young fellow finds out that he is gay. What, you may say, a gay Mormon? Brigham Young must be rolling in his grave with all of his wives.

He has his first sexual encounter after being baptized in the Mormon Temple- in it! He goes to New York, to NYU and...... well the mother is to blame. Put the blame on Mom, boys. Sigmund Freud would love this scenario.

The music by Will Aronson seems to work, even with the sometimes unsetable text.

The excellent cast almost makes up for the lack of real musical theatre. Jill Abramovitz is good, if screamy, as the mother.

Taylor Trensch is adorable as the young boy (Mormon). He looks about twelve but is obviously older since he graduated from Elon University.

 Stanley Bahorek is fine as his alter-ego and the narrator of the piece.

Adam Monley does an incredible job as the monster and all of the mother's various husbands. They all turn out to be monsters as well, as does the mother, of course. By the end of the show even the boy is turning into a monster.

Perhaps this is supposed to be a gay re-make of Ionescu's Rhinoceros.

As with the musical last season about a woman coming down with Alzheimer's and her daughter, I think this would have worked better as a straight (you should pardon the expression) play. Or an opera.

Tonight solidified my opinion that too much of what comes out of the Music Theatre Lab at Barrington Stage is from Clone City. They need to get some fresh ideas going in what could be a very fine program

But, as I said, I'm jaded.