‘Euphoria’: Loopy, Sometimes Sobering

“Euphoria,” the loopy new musical at the Actors’ Gang, is a knowing “Reefer Madness” for the ‘90s. In the view of playwright Tracy Young, we’re all looking for euphoria, from her scenes of tribal people of “Wang-gong-gong-gock” to those of Liza Minnelli and Allan Carr snorting coke in frenzied nosefuls at Studio 54.

As she did in her similarly quirky examination of female neurosis, “Hysteria,” Young throws everything into the pot here. In fact, this history of substance abuse is so all-inclusive that it employs historical figures not known for their drug use--Orson Welles is the evening’s narrator and Eve (from the Garden of Eden) the patron saint of drug taking.

Why include a famous overeater and the first person who wanted to taste an apple? As writer and director, Young tends to overindulge, just as her characters do.

She needs a ruthless editor to shape this bountiful material, much of it quite good, into something more than an entertaining, messy vaudeville. Why, for instance, does F.D.R. show up in the Prohibition number? If there’s a reason, I missed it.

You could miss a lot and still have lots of fun. In the course of a three-hour evening, we meet 119 characters, played by 16 actors, and hear a gaggle of bright songs performed by a terrific cast as if they were putting on the most talented class play ever.

Laurence O’Keefe provides the songs (but no titles), which range from a clever ditty for three efficient housewives running on Midol, Prozac and the fumes from cleaning products, to a history of Prohibition, led by a singing Carrie Nation, to a tearful goodbye from a mom to her heroin-addicted son.

Finally, Young fixes on no one message. She floats the idea that the government allows drugs that calm and depress people but not those that free people to think independently. Yet she’s pretty tough on all manner of dependency, including teenage candy addicts and garden-variety alcoholics who learn from their distant alcoholic parents that drinking is an excellent substitute for actual contact.

Most of the quick-sketch portraits are meant for fun and for mini-insights, but a couple achieve real poignancy. Greg White is mesmerizing as Amber Bouquet, a heroin-addicted drag queen who is so real and haunted that to see him in a suit is to see something terribly, terribly wrong. Daniel T. Parker is also fine as Amber’s mother, a fat waitress in a faded party dress.

Other standouts include Julie Ann Taylor as Stevie Nicks’ overly devoted assistant; Chris Wells as the urbane Welles, poised between boy genius and obesity; and Dina Platias as a flapper whose excessive drinking echoes through the decades to her granddaughter, who she also plays.

If you’re going to make a musical about the search for artificially induced bliss, it should be endearingly loopy, and “Euphoria” is. It also hovers on the brink of being a truly sobering evening.

* “Euphoria,” Actors’ Gang Theater, 6209 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood, Thursday-Sunday, 8 p.m. Ends Nov. 16. $12-$15. (213) 466-1767. Running time: 3 hours.