“Ask for the Moon,” a new musical farce at Goodspeed Musicals’ Norma Terris Theatre through Sunday, is making the theater world safe again for jokes about Nazi-styled villains, dirty old men and mangled fingers, all delivered through sweet operatic warbling. If that strikes you as an odd stylistic quest, it’s no odder than the show’s plot, in which an arts philanthropist and a nurse fend off a bunch of creepy men so they can murder a barely breathing invalid on a cruise ship. Darko Tresnjak, who wrote the book and lyrics, also directs the musical, mingling his respect for high artistic craft with a desire to laugh.
This is sheer escapism: An adventure at sea with crude humor and a lot of killing. “Ask for the Moon” feels like a parody, but it’s a parody of things that we don’t see anymore like 19th-century operetta or pre-Titanic cruise ship comedy adventures or high society melodramas. It plays like one of those “Carol Burnett Show” sketches where they’d be mocking forgotten 1930s movie styles in the 1970s.
The time period of “Ask for the Moon” is listed in the playbill as “recentish,” but the first act of it looks like “The Philadelphia Story” and the second looks like “Anything Goes.” Some fun is had with these disorienting settings. A lot of the plot comes from the scheming of evil, idle rich people so it’s appropriate that they live in their own strange little world.
When a show offers extended jokes about Anton Chekhov and Arthu.