One puff was all it took. One day, Jimmy Harper was an all-American high school kid, shyly courting his best gal Mary Lane as they studied up their Shakespeare for class. But shortly after being inveigled by a sly pusher into taking a whiff from a spliff, he’s transformed into a thieving, deceiving addict. Many puffs later, Mary follows him down the road to perdition, which ends, naturally, in doom. Many dooms. Doom!

That’s the plot, such as it is, of Reefer Madness. Widely considered one of the worst travesties ever screened, the 1936 bluntsploitation film hyperbolized hysteria over cannabis, terrifying parents who feared a puff of the evil herbage would inevitably catapult teens to depravity and destruction. For years, the movie served as propaganda in the country’s racist, scientifically unfounded war on weed, which did more damage and induced more insanity than the allegedly evil enemy ever could. 

Until the early 1970s, that is, when a member of the legal reform organization NORML found a copy, and realized that the film wasn’t copyrighted and that it could work much better as a spoof and a pro-legalization fundraiser aimed at snickering stoner students than it ever did as a warning. Late-night screenings of Reefer Madness soon sprouted like, well, you know what, on university campuses. Enhanced by irony and THC, the former fear factor transformed into a college giggle fest. A generation later, a stage musical adaptation inevitably followed.

Reefer Madness: The Musical’s original 1998 Santa Monica production surprised even the satirical show’s creators, Kevin Murphy and Dan Studney, by earning an extended run and several awards before moving to London, Off Broadway, and beyond. Then, naturally, it followed what’s become the typical movie-to-stage-back-to-movie cycle (The Producers, Lion King, et al) via a 2005 Showtime film, which starred Alan Cumming and Neve and Christian Campbell and scored an Emmy. 

The script evolved along the way, commendably trimming the run time (though not quite tight enough), so that the current production includes material from later incarnations. Last year, the creators and original stars even produced an acclaimed 25th anniversary L.A. revival. Now the musical has reached the Oregon college town of Forest Grove, at Theatre in the Grove, where it should entertain students and boomers alike.

Descent into Destruction

The story, mostly cribbed from the original, follows 1930s American high schoolers Jimmy (engagingly played by Alex Youngblood) and his best gal Mary (powerfully sung by Makena Barnett) from the wholesome dances at the Five and Dime (here somewhat anachronistically resembling a 1950s-style soda shop vibe, complete with early rock music) into the nefarious Reefer Den.

From there, we follow their Demon Weed-fueled descent into debt, dissolution, debauchery, depravity, and damnation, not to mention theft (from a church, no less!), dangerously high-velocity jazz piano, and ultimately multiple deaths — by car, gun, garden hoe —and even cannibalism. You know, the kind of stuff that happens every time an innocent soul goes one toke over the line. 

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The action is framed by the Lecturer (Travis Schlegel), a glowering, geriatric high school official who’s overheatedly presenting Jimmy’s terrifying tale to a group of concerned parents. A leggy Placard Girl (Athena Leonard) periodically struts grinningly across the stage, hoisting signs that nail down each scene’s Moral Message (“Reefer Makes You Kill Your Babies”), with all the subtlety of the original film. 

There’s a hilarious cameo by Jesus Christ himself (a terrific Nick Serrone, who also shines in the major tough-guy role of drug dealer/pimp/gangster Jack Stone), a zombie chorus, an abused moll with a heart of gold (Leslie Inmon), even a Deus-ex-machina peroration from no less than President Franklin Roosevelt himself. Everyone somehow gets their just desserts, with an impossibly sorta-happy ending for our hapless protagonists.

But of course we’re not here for the inane moralistic story. Like all such spoofs (think predecessors like 1982’s Little Shop of Horrors and/or even Rocky Horror Show), RM:TM is basically a one-joke entertainment: Let’s all chortle at the overwrought fears of our irony-challenged ancestors. That lasts about five minutes, and then whether the campy show can sustain interest depends on two factors: the production (songs, acting, design etc.), and each audience member’s level of THC. Alas, for this review, assessing the former required eschewing the latter, so YMMV. 

Studney’s upbeat music is a serviceable pastiche of various styles and eras, but the real star is Murphy’s waggish lyrics, teeming with appropriately egregious puns and catching the ideal comic vibe. And where else will you find ingenious stage rhymes for unlikely words like “quadrilateral” and “transubstantiate”? Throughout the show, I eagerly anticipated what surprises he’d light up next.

A few opening-weekend head microphone glitches and pacing lags aside, Theatre in The Grove’s genial production surmounted the script’s occasional slow patches when the plot dutifully unspooled for a little too long for sober viewers. As winningly directed by TitG veteran Dorinda Toner, everyone plays everything over the top, of course — none higher than Trevor Sanderson as Ralph, the fallen frat bro junkie who’s preceded Jimmy and Mary into degeneracy. His acute case of the munchies proves terminal — and not just for him. Sanderson’s riotous second-act duet (“Little Mary Sunshine”) with Barnett’s Mary Lane as her fearsome, doobie-induced inner dom is unleashed (but not unlashed) reached this production’s height of hilarity. Despite their head mikes, some of the weaker singers were sporadically covered by the band, but their acting chops more than compensated.

James Grimes’s minimal set design (divan, bench, ladder, lectern) placed the five-piece band (directed by Alicia Barrett) on a pedestal upstage, leaving plenty of room for different locations and action. Garish OG drug hysteria movie posters evoked the original movie’s unhinged era. Even the pre-show recorded music (predictable yet appropriate tunes by Bobs Marley and Dylan, Grateful Dead, Tom Petty, Jimmy Cliff, Pink Floyd and more) and the bong-shaped cups for sale in the lobby with beverages and, yes, brownies, all contributed to the, er, high-spirited atmosphere. 

This entertaining Reefer Madness makes a fun flashback, but despite its 90-year-old source material and cannabis’s changed status, the show feels newly timely, given the script’s last-minute underlining of the role of fake news (then: Hearst; now: Fox et al) and fascistic government propaganda in America’s misconceived, century-long campaigns to treat what were at most medical issues with brutal police state repression. For all the chuckles they later evoked, those tactics perpetrated (and continue to wreak) severe damage on too many lives and our civil liberties. However risible the attitudes RM:TM satirizes seem today, for its millions of casualties, the drug war that spawned it was no joke. I wish the script or, better, TitG’s program had provided more of that admittedly sobering historical/political context. 

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Still, Reefer Madness: The Musical maintains Theatre in the Grove’s high hit rate, including this season’s uproarious opener, Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors. Its shows, especially musicals, are almost always worth the trip to Washington County’s western hinterlands.

***

Reefer Madness: The Musical runs through April 12 at Theatre in the Grove, 2028 Pacific Ave. Forest Grove. with a special midnight showing April 5, though the run ends, alas, before 4/20. As noted throughout the program and theater, “the use of cannabis products and/or other illicit drugs is prohibited on the property of Theatre in the Grove.” Anyone who, for whatever reason, prefers not to drive can take the 57 bus, which drops you off across Forest Grove’s quaint, old-school main street from the theater. Tickets here.