The inspiration for the New Group’s latest production, the memorably titled Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse (Signature Theatre, to June 1), is an infamous photograph taken of Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsay Lohan in 2006. In that image, the trio were pictured sitting in a car outside the Beverly Hills Hotel—a snapshot-collision of celebrity, influence, and youth at a specific moment in pop culture that the New York Post headlined “3 Bimbos Of The Apocalypse.”
The accompanying article had a lot to say about the trio’s partying, apparent vapidity, and feverish embrace of fame. In the years since, there has been much commentary about the just-as-feverish sexism of a media that was so dedicated to the patrolling and shaming of young female celebrities, while constantly photographing them and making money from their dramas and traumas. At the time the media sold them as the empty-headed “bimbos” of the headline, but were they?
In this 90-minute musical—directed and developed by Rory Pelsue; with book, music, and lyrics by Michael Breslin and book, additional music and lyrics by Patrick Foley—a fourth unseen person becomes the focus of interest now 19 years later. Does the presence of a mysterious hand behind the trio, and a bracelet reading “Coco,” mean there was a fourth person with them, and if so who was Coco? In answering the question, the show takes an alternately witty and dead-serious scalpel to contemporary celebrity.
At least at first, Last Bimbo seems hysterical and knowing, its outsized-hype tone and rock-out songs matching the outsized hype it sets out to skewer.
Patrick Nathan Folk, Luke Islam, and Milly Shapiro play a trio of relentlessly online “worms” in the present day—for most of the show they never meet, stuck in front of screens in their respective homes—determined to solve the mystery of Coco and amass as many followers as possible, while they are “doom-scrolling through the end of times…gummy worms for brains/no emotions, rising oceans/apocalypse is in my veins.”
The high-energy songs and choreography contrast sharply with the isolation of the worms (it is oddly moving when they speak in private channels, revealing themselves, as opposed to their fame-hungry online personas). What they discover, and what is spoiler-free to write here: that Coco (Keri René Fuller) sang a one-hit wonder, then seemingly died.
But what of the sinister presence and influence of Coco’s mother, or rather MOTHER! as she is listed in the program (to give her her full queer honorific)—played by a standout Sara Gettelfinger—and a mysterious girl in a hoodie (Natalie Walker), who the trio first imagine to be Coco’s secret lesbian lover? “Watching her eat those Pringles/I’m starting to feel these tingles,” is one of my favorite musical couplets of the year so far.
The talented Foley and Breslin—Pulitzer finalists and Obie Award winners for their play Circle Jerk, who also wrote the very funny This American Wife—sift the seeds of modern times into absurdist sorting buckets, such as one of the worms proclaiming, “The first time I heard you talk about Juicy Couture tracksuits, I felt like I finally understood the cultural context of 9/11,” to which the other responds, “And I never understood why Britney Spears shaved her head until you taught me about Operation Iraqi Freedom.”
Brainworm (Shapiro) is the only dead-still, monotone member of the company—a 2025 Daria—genuinely fixated on finding out what happened to Coco: “I’m an intersectional feminist, but dead white girls are my crack,” she says.
The musical, with impressively era-specific costumes by Cole McCarty, loudly and repetitively skewers clothes labels, Perez Hilton, and the brain-addling detritus of celebrity culture—before turning darker, more serious, punchier, and better.
Its underlying intent is in the lyrics to Coco’s one-hit wonder: “It takes a lot to take nothin’/and make it into somethin’.” Coco’s making something out of nothing turns out to be the twisted true roots of her story; and although MOTHER! at first seems a villain, her raging voice of doom—“Stop scrolling/stop scrolling/Log off and live”—turns out to be the most prescient.
Hilton, Lohan, Spears, and Coco were far from bimbos, the musical makes clear. Coco sings that she is “the last of the great American experiment/And that’s hot/And you’re not.” Like much in the musical, it’s a line (echoing Hilton) that’s dumbly funny and acutely damning, both at once.
In their forging of celebrity, the media’s sinister dance with them and the flourishing of the internet, the young women parlayed as best they could the strange hands they were both given and made for themselves. What that says about them, a craven media, fan culture, and the extremely online is the musical’s true concern. Listen to MOTHER!, Last Bimbo very seriously insists: it’s no joke.
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