Perhaps you thought you could get away with secretly reading “Fifty Shades of Grey” on your Kindles and iPads. But your naughty literary predilections will be exposed should you see “Cuff Me: The Fifty Shades of Grey Unauthorized Musical Parody.”
Then again, anyone familiar with the painfully silly erotic trilogy will know that “parody” is redundant.
For those of you who haven’t read them — and that means most people with a Y chromosome — E.L. James’ best-selling series concerns the sadomasochistic relationship between rich 27-year-old entrepreneur Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele, the hopelessly naive young college student who falls under his sexual spell.
This musical spoof — conceived by Tim Flaherty and co-written by him and several members of the Virginia-based sketch comedy troupe the Pushers — has its four-member cast singing along to prerecorded tracks for “I Touch Myself,” “Call Me Maybe” “Like a Virgin” and “. . . Baby One More Time.” Only the lyrics have been changed to titillate the innocent.
The musical numbers are framed by scenes set in a nail salon, with the story being told to apparently the only woman alive who hasn’t read the books.
“He beats her with his belt so she can’t sit down for three days,” a fan gushes. “It’s so romantic!”
We then see Christian (a suitably chiseled Matthew Brian Bagley) seduce the dazzled Ana (Laurie Elizabeth Gardner), who doesn’t seem to mind that he wears assless pants or that his shopping list includes rope, ball gags and bungee cords. In between their highly physical, if PG-13-rated sexual exploits, she periodically taps into her Inner Goddess, who resembles a clumsy ballerina.
As directed by Sonya Carter, “Cuff Me” is far more slapdash than the similar “Silence! The Musical,” the unauthorized hit spoof of “The Silence of the Lambs.” The gags here are fairly predictable, and lines like “My goodness, you’re as red as the Communist Manifesto” fall thuddingly flat. But as energetically performed by the ever-game ensemble, the show is silly fun, and the ribald parodies of songs like “Livin’ La Vida Loca” (“Spankin’ It While I Poke Ya”) mainly hit their mark.
The sheer incongruity of the venue — the Actors Temple Theatre —is also good for a laugh. When Ana’s lawyer, asked if the sex contract Christian’s drawn up for her to sign is weird, he naturally replies, “Weird, Miss Steele? Weird is doing a sex farce in a synagogue.”