This campy eighties throwback is the most fun you can have with bedbugs without having to burn the sheets

Bedbugs are making a comeback. Not that they ever really left, but these days it’s impossible to scroll through Facebook without seeing an article about which NYC subway line is the latest victim of a bedbug infestation. So it’s fitting that Paul Leschen and Fred Sauter’s musical has reemerged under Robert Bartley’s direction, after selling out its extended run at the New York Musical Theatre Festival in 2008, and then again appearing for an off off Broadway run in 2012. Bedbugs!!! sets its psychotically hilarious tone right off the bat. In a flashback, Carly (Grace McLean) is up past her bedtime watching her favorite singer Dionne Salon on TV. Dionne (Brian Charles Rooney) is a world-famous Canadian star, discovered at age thirteen by her manager slash husband Dexter (Danny Bolero), and obsessed by the Power of Love—sound familiar? Entranced with Dionne’s haunting performance, Carly doesn’t hear her mother (Gretchen Wylder) getting attacked by bedbugs in the next room. The attack leads to a freak accident that kills her mother, which stirs in Carly a lifelong sense of guilt and an irrational hatred of bedbugs and Celine Dion, I mean, Dionne Salon.