Review: CASHINO at Birdland Is High-Energy, Nonstop Fun

Cashino at Birdland is nonstop, high energy fun. Over twenty years ago, Susie Mosher (Hairspray) and recording artist John Boswell came up with the characters Johnny Niagra and Pepper Cole, two desperate, crazy Vegas casino singers. They filmed four short films as the characters, featuring guest appearances by the likes of Kathy Najimy, Will Ferrell and Tiffani Thiessen. Mosher and Boswell are doing a limited run of four Cashino shows, each one opening with one of the films followed by a high energy live set, with Mosher and Boswell in character as the two crazy cats. If you haven’t made it out yet, there are two more performances on June 25th and July 30th. And, even if you did make it out to one of the two shows already, each one has a completely different sets and a different movie up top, so you’ll still get a show you’ve never seen before.

The Tuesday May 28th show was crazy indeed, with mashup after mashup so insane, if you had seen it on paper it would have made you go “What? There’s no way this could work.” (Example: a deadpan mashup of Chicago the musical and Chicago the band, and a “Midler on the Roof” mashup.) But, reader, they all worked – in no small part due to Mosher and Boswell going all-in on their acting choices. They were Pepper Cole and Johnny Niagra, a bit desperate, a bit out of touch, but completely sincere. In the live set’s opening medley, “Let Me Entertain You” from Gypsy abruptly melded into Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” on the word “time,” so the line became “We’ll have a real good / Time after time.” That song then melded into “Eye of the Tiger,” whose lyric also contains the word time.

There was a lot of musical theater and 1980s rock “inside baseball,” and I’ll admit that a lot of the specific references to 80s music went over my head. I’m sure the Chicago/Chicago mashup, for example, would have been even more enjoyable had I been familiar with both halves of the music references and known exactly what they were doing – they blended songs from the two together, setting some lyrics from Chicago to the tune of Chicago songs, and going back and forth between snippets of Chicago and Chicago. However, even if you’re not privy to every single aspect of the intensely specific references they made throughout, you can still appreciate the insanity for what it is. For the most part, they chose broad strokes, popular songs that most people would be familiar with and then bended them into bizarre, parodic medleys – like a set of “scary 80s songs” with lyrics from Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” casually blending into The Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” and then leading to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” sung with parody lyrics.

I’m not going to try to break down every single medley – they were coming too rapid fire for me to note down every musical twist or clever line – but the night consisted of plenty of physical comedy (mostly by Mosher, as Boswell was parked at the piano for most of the show), and demented, hilarious acting choices paired with superb and just plain fun singing, which the crowd very much appreciated. To say they loved the short film preceding the live set would be an understatement. Birdland’s basement was roaring with laughter at the antics of the two wannabe singers, who in this short were gearing up for a movie being made about them (in which Mosher’s character, tragically, was not even cast to play herself).

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You can see Mosher every other Tuesday at Birdland hosting The Lineup, a wild, anything-goes variety show featuring entertainers from the Broadway, cabaret and comedy scenes.

Find more upcoming shows at Birdland on their website.

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