The Opposite of Sex

"This part where I take the gun is, like, duh, important," Dedee Truitt informs the audience, near the start of The Opposite of Sex, a new musical based on Don Roos' screenplay. "This is, like, foreshadowing, which we covered in Dickens?" The thing about Dedee's musical is that it's, like, not really serious. She's too knowing and cool to be a heroine in an earnest musical. So she, like, talks to the audience and stuff. Dedee's a ruthless chick from Louisiana who finds herself pregnant but has no shame about ruining the career of her half-brother, Bill, to get what she needs. Bill is a grieving, 35-year-old gay man with a job teaching English in high school. Dedee runs to him after some trouble at home, steals Bill's young-but-stupid boyfriend, and later blackmails Bill for money to help raise the baby. She's a "walking tabloid," as a friend of Bill's says, and it's the lurid, tabloid-worthy scenes that make The Opposite of Sex any good at all. (Ian Scott McGregor is electric as Dedee's white-trash Louisiana boyfriend, for example.) Otherwise this is just another musical, with surprisingly bland music churned out by a live rock-jazz quartet offstage. Kerry Butler does fine professional work as Dedee, and Jeff McCarthy is hilarious as a baritone cop named Carl, but the music and lyrics never take wing from their own clichés, in spite of Dedee's full-on, like, attitude about the whole musical-theater thing.