‘Late Breaking Muse’ Covers the Environment

Anything created by a member of the Mums, the juggling troupe with jugular vein humor, promises to be a little different.

“Late Breaking Muse,” an ecologically-themed pastiche by the Mums’ Nathan Stein, staged for free outdoors in Santa Monica’s Ocean Beach Park, doesn’t completely hang together, but its more inspired moments are diverting.

There’s a story of sorts, a loosely woven backdrop for bits of magic,club-torch-and-fish-juggling, slapstick and satiric soliloquies.

Vying for a job on the Atlantis-bound S.S. Oteric are Noah (Stein), a recovering juggler who can’t seem to meet girls; J.J. Sparks (Jan Munroe), an inventor with a shaky ego; and T. Ray Nickel (Bill Frenzer), a crude entrepreneur looking for crude oil.

They’re recruited by Elaine Fatale (A. Lorre), a ditzy Atlantis inhabitant, who is tired of all the oil spills at sea. “You think it’s easy trying to photosynthesize under a greasy layer of shmutz ?”

She gives each a task to prove himself most worthy--a device for solo sight gags, puns and satire. It’s also an excuse for Stein to work a little magic with shredded newspaper, scarves and a bird and to juggle sundry items.

Doomed to wear an oil-soaked bird around his neck for his polluting sins, Frenzer’s Nickel captivates through sheer outrageousness. He works for Accidental Oil, hails from Ft. Worthless, Tex., and if there’s oil in Atlantis, it’s his “God-given right to exploit it.”

But he won’t get that chance in Atlantis, a place where advertising companies put “poetry on soap bubbles” and “Medflies guard all living things against helicopters.”

In the end, the message is that we’re all in the same boat--the good ship Earth--and it’s time to change our destination.

As the audience lounges on spiky, close-cropped grass--with surf splashing in the background, sea gulls circling overhead and bikers and skaters wheeling by--the message seems especially apt. Tightening and trimming would help sail it home.