The Great American Trailer Park Musical goes slumming at Actors' Playhouse

The Actors' Playhouse cast of The Great American Trailer Park Musical

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By David Nehls and Betsy Kelso. Directed by David Arisco. Through February 7. Actors' Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre, 280 Miracle Mile, Coral Gables; 305-444-9293; actorsplayhouse.org

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• Margot Moreland
• Kelly Atkins
• David Nehls
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But Trailer Park is fundamentally inexcusable. If you're mystified by that declaration, if you think Trailer Park might be a bit of harmless fun at the expense of a population that could do with some ribbing, please imagine this show was called The Great American Working-Class Musical and that it asserted that all poor people were stupid, that their children were indistinguishable from dogs, and that poor husbands were dumb and boring and incapable of fixing a car. All in good fun? Maybe. Until the proletarian masses swarm your lobby and skewer you on their pitchforks, staining their Kmart threads with your blue, blue blood.

One could perhaps draw a distinction between "the poor" and "trailer trash," but that would sound creepily like the ridiculous declaration, occasionally made by racist white people out to prove how not-at-all racist they are, that "there are black people, and then there are n***ers." Maybe that's an abstruse point, and one we shouldn't expect Nehls and Kelso to arrive at on their own. After all, they wrote this thing, apparently without realizing the Bon Jovi and Dierk Bentley songs that theaters would play as filler before curtain-up would outclass, outshine, and even outwit every by-the-numbers show tune they penned.