White Noise

Royal George Theatre

Chicago

(312) 988-9000

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The blaring lights, goose-stepping, and anti-Semitic lyrics in the opening number of this new musical promise a lot more than the rest of the night delivers, said Jonathan Abarbanel in TheaterMania​.com. With Whoopi Goldberg among its producers and a cast “over-the-top with talent,” this show about the rise to pop stardom of two pretty white-supremacist teenagers never disappoints as spectacle: It offers “100 minutes of slam-bang, high-tech, rock-concert-style wizardry.” But the satire and the story fall flat. Matte O’Brien’s script provides only “the flimsiest reason” why Eva and Eden Siller became neo-Nazis, and Max, their “amoral and cynical” producer, comes off as little more than a cartoon villain.

It shouldn’t be that hard to rework the book to make it a “more credible cautionary tale,” said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. The sisters played by Mackenzie Mauzy and Emily Padgett are based, after all, on a pair of real-life California twins who gained attention in the early 2000s for pairing catchy pop songs and racist lyrics. “Predictably enough, various media outlets expressed outrage while simultaneously ensuring that their cameras focused aplenty” on the eye-catching girls. If White Noise satirized the sensationalist media that nurtures such hatred, it might have a chance to make some noise with a move up to Broadway. For now, though, its message is merely that Nazis are bad—something “most of us have figured out.”