This town knows its way around an irreverent nostalgia stage production. In recent years, we’ve been tickled by theatrical renditions of the Swayze classic Road House and the perennial yuletide weird-fest Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, to name just two—both of them stuffed with ribald, winking hilarity.
But the formula that worked well in those productions was on shakier ground with Weekend at Bernie’s—a film slathered so thoroughly in ’80s raunch, weird excess, and suntan lotion it might have been hard to script anything other than a scratchy, dot-matrix printout of the original.
Happily, the production running through the end of this month at Old Town’s newish Siren Theater isn’t that. The comedy vets behind the play version of Bernie’s—a reprise of a 2013 production—meet the 1989 film’s freakish absurdity with plenty of their own, ratcheting its characters’ basic indecency by magnitudes. It is a vulgar delight.