Dicks: The Musical opens with a title card joking that the film bravely breaks new ground by casting gay actors as straight characters.  In reality, it breaks ground by being the world’s first feature-length movie Rusical, hitting the exact same braying, sarcastic tone as the musical theatre challenges of RuPaul’s Drag Race.  In this case, we’re watching a Rusical parody of The Parent Trap (a step up from the Footloose/Dear Evan Hansen matchup from last season, at least), in which non-related writer-performers Joshua Sharp & Aaron Jackson discover they are “fucking identical twins” as adult Big City businessmen and plot to restore order in their family unit by getting their estranged parents back together.  Those estranged parents are the ringers in the cast (give or take an extended cameo from Megan Thee Stallion as the twins’ nonplussed dominatrix boss): Megan Mullally as a kooky Manhattan shut-in and Nathan Lane as a closeted Manhattan drunk.  The film’s humor recalls the offensive-on-purpose musical theatre of Trey Parker & Matt Stone, but the effort to underline every line of dialogue with an explicitly gay sense of camp is pure Drag Race kitsch.  The Fucking Identical Twins stage show that Dicks is adapted from started as a UCB revue in the 2010s and, although still funny, feels dated at least that far back in terms of its equal-opportunity-offender sensibilities.

Okay, now that the big-picture premise is out of the way, let’s talk about The Sewer Boys.  Dicks is mildly, low-key funny throughout, but it stumbles up on one truly Great joke in the unholy creation of the subhuman characters The Sewer Boys.  During Nathan Lane’s big musical number about why his marriage to the twins’ mother didn’t work out, he breaks down exactly what it means that he is a gay man: he appreciates fine things, he has sex with men, and he loves his Sewer Boys.  He is, of course, referring to the small, diapered goblins that he keeps caged in his living room, periodically feeding them with premasticated ham.  Every detail about the sewer boys’ underground origins, grotesque physiology, and hierarchy within Lane’s unconventional family structure is outrageously funny and earns most of the film’s biggest laughs.  The little grey goblin puppets are on-theme with the movie’s larger project of queering up gay-musical representation too, as Lane equates their role in his life to Gay Culture™, as if every adult gay man in America keeps a couple Sewer Boys as pets at home.  It’s obvious that Sharp & Jackson knew they struck gold when creating The Sewer Boys as a tossed-off joke, since they keep returning to the boys’ gilded cage to mine more visual punchlines out of their wretched image.  It’s disappointing, then, that they didn’t just abandon the initial Adult Men Parent Trap premise they used as an improv thought exercise to instead refine the one great idea they discovered in the process.  This should have been Sewer Boys: The Musical from start to end.

In that way, Dicks feels like a wish granted by a cursed Monkey’s Paw.  I’ve found myself wishing in recent years that partial-musical comedies like Barb & Star and Barbie would just fully commit to being proper musicals, and when I finally get one, I’m frustrated that it wasn’t a musical entirely about its one great joke.  If anything, this might have even changed my mind about wanting to force Barbie & Star into a musical theatre format, since that medium doesn’t always serve Sharp & Jackson’s humor well.  Each song in the book starts very funny, but they have nowhere to go once the audience gets the joke.  There’s a punchline up front in each song that earns a genuine laugh, and then there’s three more minutes of song left to play out in full, based on traditional stage musical structure.  Even my beloved Sewer Boys never stop being funny, but once they’re revealed it feels anticlimactic to return to the foretold Parent Trap story beats as if reality had not just been broken.  I appreciate that Mullally is eventually given her own flying pet monster to help balance that out, and Bowen Yang’s performance as God eventually builds to a joke meant to offend anyone left unshocked in the room — an ambitious last-minute gamble.  Mostly, though, Dicks: The Musical is a little too predictable in its adherence to musical theatre song & story structure, leaving very little room for surprise once the audience catches onto each telegraphed punchline.  Only The Sewer Boys continue to surprise & delight throughout, and the movie is most recommendable for their ghoulish presence.

-Brandon Ledet