Let’s Hear It For the Bimbo: THE LAST BIMBO OF THE APOCALYPSE — Review

Given the resurgence of low-rise jeans, Juicy Couture, and jelly sandals (among many other things) it’s safe to say what’s old is new again. The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse may traffic in those Y2K aesthetics but there’s nothing old about this fresh and captivating new musical from the deliciously deranged minds of Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley, who brought us the now iconic and Pulitzer Prize nominated Circle Jerk.

In Bimbo, three Gen-Z Internet sleuths investigate the mysterious disappearance of a seemingly nameless one-hit wonder of the Y2K era. They refer to themselves as The Worms and to them the early 2000s is an “ancient age.” (The script notes that these three characters are born after 2006.) The trio is led by Brainworm (Hereditary’s Milly Shapiro), a former lone wolf who specializes in cracking cold cases of girls who disappeared and were never found. When Bookworm (Patrick Nathan Falk) and Earworm (Luke Islam), an Internet duo who specialize in politics and culture, dig up a newspaper photo from 2006, it catches Brainworm’s attention. It turns out there’s more than meets the eye in that now infamous photo.

The photo in question, which also inspired the musical’s title, is one that ran on the cover of the November 29, 2006 issue of The New York Post. The headline blares “Bimbo summit” over a picture of much-maligned party girls Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, and Paris Hilton driving away from an L.A. nightclub. The cover was accompanied by an article titled “3 Bimbos of the Apocalypse” and featured classy upskirt photos. It’s the perfect distillation of early-2000s rabid paparazzi overreach and the vicious culture of gossip that pervaded the media then and still exists today.

But what if there’s a fourth girl in that photo, just out of frame, dying to get in the shot? Thanks to The Worms, she’s about to get her day in the sun. 

Her name is Coco (Keri René Fuller). She was a wannabe pop star who managed to put out one song before mysteriously vanishing off the face of the Earth. With just a music video and one proto-selfie (taken on a flip phone!), The Worms fall down an Internet rabbit hole trying to piece together Coco’s life.

Without spoiling anything, the musical swerves into the absurd as only a true crime story you might find scrolling TikTok can. It’s bonkers and disjointed, like watching a wholesome video of the latest dance trend only to be served a video of violence and war immediately after. In an age where algorithms and artificial intelligence have fractured our reality, a musical that takes place primarily on the Internet should be jarring.

The three Worms each use the Internet as a refuge from the real world, but it’s incomplete and not without its own horrors. It’s both a home and a prison for them. While they feel they can express themselves best online, they’re also each shut-ins, afraid of what’s out there. At just 12-years-old, Brainworm endured hateful comments on her channel, leading her to obscure her face in all her posts. At the top of the show, we learn she hasn’t left the house in 4 years. 

Thankfully, director Rory Pelsue doesn’t keep this trio apart but gives them full use of the stage to interact with each other and forge an intimacy many feel with their online peers. Stephanie Osin Cohen’s simple scenic designs blend both the online, liminal spaces and the real world locations seamlessly, while Megumi Katayama and Ben Truppin-Brown’s sound design evoke the dopamine-inducing pings and beeps of social media.

Breslin and Foley, who share credit for book, music, and lyrics, have concocted a score of earworms (sorry, I had to) that feel like pop-punk throwbacks of the early-2000s with a dash of contemporary musical theatre. No one conquers this score better than Keri René Fuller, whose laser beam of a voice fits this sound perfectly and rockets through the space. 

At first, Coco is just a void. Her one song “Something Out of Nothing” is a winking send up of those women on that New York Post cover (“I don’t wanna do anything/And I wanna be rewarded for it”), women we called trashy and dumb and all types of horrible things. When we learn the lengths Coco goes to achieve exactly what she wants, she’s not so brainless after all. 

Natalie Walker never misses and continues that streak here. The mystery surrounding her character (is she Coco’s stylist? Her lover? Her sister?) allows Walker to display a wide breadth of her seemingly endless talents. Along with Sara Gettelfinger’s whacky turn as Coco’s mother, the three of them make the material’s dark comedy shine.

Throughout, Cole McCarty’s costume design is spot on but never is it more pitch perfect than when capturing the deliciously sleazy Y2K aesthetic. His sartorial color palette incorporates the cool blues and purples of Amith Chandrashaker’s dreamy lighting. 

Thanks to the bloggers of the early-2000s—don’t worry, Bimbo clocks Perez Hilton—misogynistic schadenfreude was the name of the game. While it’s still present today, our online interests have swung in a true crime direction. Bimbo explores both of these phenomena, but ultimately it’s also an ode to the women we pointed and laughed at. We rolled our eyes and called them dumb, yet we clamored to see what they would do next. The truth is: If paparazzi were to follow most of us around, no one would care. As Coco tells us: “It takes a lot to take nothin’ and make it into somethin.’”

The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse runs through June 1 at The New Group. For tickets and more information, visit here.