Harker Jones | February 16, 2018
The “Unauthorized Musical Parody Of…” series has a recipe that always works: take a beloved film, break it down to its most basic parts, find ways to lovingly exploit them and then loop in pop songs that help propel the story. And it works every time. The energy and talent on display at Rockwell Table & Stage are oftentimes some of the best the L.A. theater community has to offer. And while taking on something as wild and ambitious as “Jurassic Park” seems destined for, if not a failure, at least disappointment, it doesn’t seem to matter the grandness of the scope of a film because the “UMPO” camp can do just about anything.
Michael Crichton wrote the bestseller on which Steven Spielberg based his 1993 film adaptation, which went on to become a worldwide smash and spawned three sequels (with a fourth coming soon). The fantasy-thriller focuses on an island that is set to become a theme park with real-life dinosaurs cloned from DNA. When one of the creatures kills an employee, the park’s owner John Hammond (Owain Rhys Davies) recruits three paleontologists, Alan Grant (Keir Kirkegaard), Ellie Sattler (Lesley McKinnell) and Ian Malcolm (Michael Thomas Grant, who is referred to solely as Goldblum since Jeff Goldblum, who played the role in the film, transcends every character he plays), to come in to oversee and do damage control. Of course, to our delight, things don’t go according to plan.
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