Chris Hall, Brian Charles Rooney, Grace McLean and others bug out in Paul Leschen and Fred Sauter’s sci-fi rock musical about deadly critters

A review of Bedbugs!!! by Adam Feldman | October 6, 2014

Bedbugs!!! just won’t die. First mounted at the New York Musical Theatre Festival in 2008, then revived in an Off-Off Broadway trial in 2012, Paul Leschen and Fred Sauter’s tenacious critter has now crawled up again for a real Off Broadway run. This engrossingly gross camp-rock musical, which splices DNA from Little Shop of Horrors, The Rocky Horror Show and 1980s light-metal bands, twists B-movie conventions into a pretzel. Carly (McLean) is an exterminator who blames bedbugs for the death of her mother and will stop at nothing to eradicate them from New York, but her mad science winds up creating a race of humanoid superbugs led by Cimex (Hall), who aims to take her as his queen. Can he be stopped? And how does the cheese-loving Quebecois songbird Dionne Salon (Rooney) fit into it all?